🚀 go-pugleaf

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Date: 13 Jan 93 16:51:42 AST
From: "Philip M. Howard, Academic User Support" <PHILIP@SHARK.STMARYS.CA>

> Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1993 11:47:20 EST
> From: JOHN BARR <barr@shrsys.hslc.org> (HSLC)
>
> I've been using the glossary from Malkin's "FYI ..."
> in my class but for a broader, less technically inclined
> audience this is too specific.
>
> I need a brief glossary with terms like gopher, wais, usenet,
etc. > Before I make up my own, does anyone know of one I can FTP?

> John Barr
> Health Sciences Libraries Consortium
> Philadelphia, PA
> barr@shrsys.hslc.org

I found the following on the net. It seems to be a concise definition
of the three major "extended services", gopher, WAIS, and WWW.

---------------------------  included text follows  -----------------

Date: 1 Oct 92 13:39:35 GMT From: HANK@BARILVM.BITNET (Hank
Nussbacher)
Subject: Comparison between Gopher, WAIS and WWW
Newsgroups: alt.gopher, comp.infosystems.gopher,
comp.infosystems.wais
Organization: Bar-Ilan University Computing Center, Israel

I have been trying for the past few weeks to examine the
benefits of Gopher/WAIS/WWW and to see which would be the
most appropriate to use. I would like to present my findings
so that others may benefit.

Gopher is a menu driven system. Each Gopher server has links
to other Gopher servers so that one can "seamlessly" bounce
from one server to another with no perceived change of
environment. Gopher's down-side that I have determined is in
finding the proper resource. There now exists dozens of
Gophers, each with dozens of sub-menus. Somewhere buried in
some Gopher server on the other side of the world might be
some very important resource that you have been looking for.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to know about that
resource unless you start a lengthy and time consuming
Gopher tour.

WAIS is a method of searching indexed text. Someone can come
along and take a hundred files on the topic of numerical
analysis and index them into one .SRC file. New resources
are announced in a special indexed database called
"directory-of-servers" which solves the Gopher problem
mentioned above.

WWW is hypertext. It goes beyond Gopher which can display
menus and beyond WAIS by allowing pointers and chains within
the text. Hypertext links can lead you down a path that may
be fruitful or it may be a dead end. Anyone who has used
Hypertext on a multimedia system knows the power that it
affords the user.

So which is for you?

I view Gopher as the SMTP/SNMP of information retrieval. I
would call Gopher - Simple Information Retrieval (SIR). That
is the reason it is far more popular that WAIS and WWW
combined. But why is that so? Let us take an example. You
are mandated to create an information system for your
university. You would like to include, among many things,
local bus line timetables, restaurants in the area, and
apartment rentals.

We could set all the data into a WAIS index and the user
could search of the word "McDoogal Street" and find which
buses run there, which restaurants are there as well as
apartments to be rented. But if the restaurant is located on
a side street off of McDoogal Street it will not come up in
the search. How is a student to know where is a good place
to live near the campus? What words would he/she use to
search with? Clearly WAIS is not the solution.

Lets try WWW. We could create the following Hypertext: I
could find an apartment to rent on McDoogal and then click
to see the closest bus line and then click its time schedule
and then click to see what Chinese restaurants are nearby.
The possibilities are endless. It is super-cool. But
practical - no way. No university would invest the manpower
to hypertext all this info (which takes enormous time and
needs to be constantly updated) and add in all the necessary
textual links. When is Hypertext needed? Encyclopedias and
reference books are ideal to be hypertexted. You do it once
and you don't have to update it the next semester. You can
even buy data that has already been hypertexted - as long as
there is enough of a demand from a commercial source. But to
sit and hypertext the QX-1 bus line is an extreme waste of
resources.

This is where Gopher comes in. A user is given a menu with 3
submenus: Bus lines, restaurants, apartment rentals. The
user goes to the document, brings it up, scans it, perhaps
prints it to show to a friend. A secretary can be in charge
of updating the file. It is a straight ASCII file with no
special codes or pointers. In other words, it is easy to
maintain and easy to retrieve.

The recent excellent Krol book "The Whole Internet Users
Guide and Catalog" comes out in favor of WWW over Gopher. I
suspect this is a common trap us techo-dweebs fall into. The
more features, the more powerful, the better the system has
to be. It is the same pitfall people fell into 10 years ago
when they ran out to buy a PC to balance their checkbooks.

If you wish to set up a campus information system that is
simple to use, and simple to maintain, I suggest you look
into Gopher. If you wish to support a certain campus faculty
(like medicine or law) that has many online documents that
they wish to be able to search easily, look into WAIS. If
you have reference books and extra manpower available look
into WWW.

Hope this helps.

Hank Nussbacher
Bar-Ilan University
Israel
hank@vm.biu.ac.il
----------------
Philip M. Howard                         |Internet:PHoward@Husky1.StMarys.ca
Technical Support Analyst                |     Tel: (902) 420-5481
Academic User Support, Computer Services |     Fax: (902) 420-5561
Saint Mary's University                  |"Maintaining regularity
Halifax, Nova Scotia     CANADA B3H 3C3  |      without drugs or medication"