Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!newcastle.ac.uk!turing!ncmh
From: Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: The Great Renaming of 5 Years Hence
Message-ID: <1990Feb28.140559.21555@newcastle.ac.uk>
Date: 28 Feb 90 14:05:59 GMT
Sender: news@newcastle.ac.uk
Organization: Computing Laboratory, U of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NE17RU
Lines: 19

I would just like to observe that within universities, the traditional
hierarchical naming schemes are fractured (?) with cross-disciplinary
fields all over the place.  We don't really want a tree-structured
hierarchy, but a directed graph; sort of an extended relational
database.  Thus, to take a contentious example, one should be able
to access rec.aquaria by "fishies", "ichthyology", "biology.marine",
"soc.culture.snails", etc. etc.; even libraries allow access by
name, author, and subject(s).

So: given that we want (or should want) to plan for the
next generation of news access:
        1. What should the user interface look like?
        2. What would be the underlying distributed database?
Any thoughts?

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  Chris Holt, Computing Lab., U. of Newcastle  |  Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk
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   "I will show you fear in a handful of bits..."