Re: Searching

Edward Vielmetti (emv@msen.com)
Fri, 18 Dec 92 20:17:25 EST


Lou,

Neither gopher nor world wide web currently have any mechanisms for
dealing with searches or retrievals that cover multiple different
selections. That's not to say that the servers as they exist right
now aren't ready for it; it's just a matter of building a client
that has a "tag" command and then a "search on all tagged items"
or a "display merged list of all tagged directories".

Given your design goals though I suspect that the implementation I
would use would be a usenet news feed and news readers with calendar
events posted by newsgroup and with subject lines that sorted appropriately
so the events showed up in order. E.g.

Newsgroups: ukans.events.film
Subject: 92/12/16 It's a Wonderful Life, Parsons Hall, 7:30 pm $2
From: cinemania@cs.ukans.edu (Cinemania Student Films)

The classic Frank Capra movie, with a Rocky Horror twist -
free entry with costume.

Once you have the data in this form you can cross-post to deal
with events that cross organization boundaries, build simple
gopher-to-nntp services that let people browse, and even deliver
selected pieces of information by e-mail so that people don't have
to learn anything more than their current mailer.

Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 998 GLOB