The Role of Resource Discovery in Support of a National Software Exchange
Michael F. Schwartz · 2001
rative agreement over protocols, information formats, and organizational structures. While standards are helpful, it is difficult to specify standards that are both globally adopted and technologically current. Moreover, standards based on a hierarchical organization require a high degree of agreement over the organization of at least the upper levels of the tree. As an increasingly diverse collection of institutions contribute to the global information infrastructure, smooth evolution will require the ability to support multiple organizational structures, and to interoperate with a heterogeneous set of protocols and information formats. Our investigations cover a range of techniques. To date these efforts have included research into providing Internet "white pages" [Schwartz & Tsirigotis 1991a]; characterizing the organizational structure of distributed collaboration via electronic mail [Schwartz & Wood 1990]; devising probabilistic algorithms for supporting attribute-based ("yellow p