Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!PSI.COM!schoff
From: schoff@PSI.COM ("Martin Lee Schoffstall")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: copyright status and future development of comp.archives
Message-ID: <9106261948.AA20843@psi.com>
Date: 26 Jun 91 19:48:28 GMT
References: <56075900D99F401D02@vms.cis.pitt.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: world
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Ed,
 
You write....
> So far as I can tell, none of the
> commercial internet providers as of yet have anyone filling this role;
> Cerfnet and ANS has nothing along this line, UUNET's generic title is
> "postmaster", and everyone at PSI is working on X.500.

Actually PSI is working on X.500, Z39.50v2, SNMP, and several research
protocols...

In your initial posting you took a shot at X.500, and in some sense
it is implicit in this message also.  While there are a number of
negative aspects vis a vis X.500 it IS intended and IS being used to
register all kinds of information today.  Your obviously familiar with
the WhitePages work that many people have worked on over the last three
years.  As with any new network protocol there is the chicken and egg
problem, now that we have Mac applications that are available via anonymous
FTP and soon MSDOS applications I'd like to believe that we're going to
break out of our shell!

What you may not be aware of is that X.500 is bound to information retreival
(and of course information registration).  Under DARPA R&D sponsorship
PSI, along with a few other organizations, (Jon Postel can speak to
"FOX") we have been exploring this.  We have a tool which integrates
X.500 and Anonmous FTP so that you can (today) explore the RFC hierarchy
by author, title, etc, and then grab the document from various sites
which hold the RFC's.  The tool is called x5ftp and will be released
no later then the end of the project (31dec91).

And we're extending the model to deal with other things than RFC's....

But again X.500 is not the perfect protocol for information retreival,
neither is Z39.50, and we won't even talk about MARC records!  Recently
due to a discussion in the FOX group we decided to issue the equivalent
of a position paper which is titled "Towards Networked Information
Retrieval", available via anonymous FTP from uu.psi.com in

	wp/nir.ms (troff, ms macros)
	wp/ps/nir.ms (Postscript)

Take a look.

I think your efforts are appreciated by many, I hope they are fruitful,
others are working hard too, and believe that they are on a fruitful
path too.  A decade from now we MAY know who was right.

Marty

PS:  There is some X.500/WhitePages information on-line which can be
	retreived by sending email to wp-info@psi.com, a NULL message
	will suffice, as it does an "auto-reply".