Accessing HEP Collaboration Documents using WWW and WAIS

Abstract

WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Server. It is a distributed information retrieval system. A WAIS system has a client-server architecture which consists of clients talking to a server via a TCP/IP network using the ANSI standard Z39-50 VI protocol. A freely available version (FreeWAIS) is supported by the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval, also known as CNIDR. FreeWAIS-sf, which is the software the authors are using at Fermilab, is an extension of FreeWAIS. FreeWAIS-sf supports all the functionalities which FreeWAIS offers as well as additional indexing and searching capabilities for structured fields. World Wide Web (WWW) was originally developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and is now the backbone for serving information on Internet. Here, the authors describe a system for accessing HEP collaboration documents using WWW and WAIS.