Abstract

Wide area networks offer access to an increasing number and variety of resources, such as documents, software, and network services. Yet, it is difficult to locate resources of interest, because of the scale and decentralized nature of the environment. We are interested in supporting a global confederation of loosely cooperating systems and users that share far more resources than can be completely organized. Therefore, mechanisms are needed to support incremental organization of the resources, based on the efforts of many geographically decentralized individuals, and a range of different information sources of varying degrees of quality. In this paper we describe a prototype implementation of a set of mechanisms intended to explore this problem in the specific domain of public Internet archives, accessible via the "anonymous" File Transfer Protocol. This is an interesting test case, because it encompasses a very large scale, administratively decentralized collection of resources, with considerable practical value.

Citations