The Networked Resource Discovery Project.
Michael F. Schwartz · 1989
Large scale computer networks provide access to a bewilderingly large number and variety of resources, including retail products, network services, and people in various capacities. We consider the problem of allowing users to discover the existence of such resources in an administratively decentralized environment. We describe an approach for a system that accesses the distributed collection of repositories that naturally maintain resource information, rather than building a global database to register all resources. A key problem is organizing the resource space in a manner suitable to all participants. Rather than imposing an inflexible hierarchical organization, our approach allows the resource space organization to evolve in accordance with what resources exist and what types of queries users make. Concretely, a set of agents organize and search the resource space by constructing links between the repositories of resource information based on keywords that describe the contents of...