>I believe that there is no enough effort being put into this critical
>area. Over the last couple years several systems have suggested and
>implemented ways to share information among robots. I would like to
>see the robot community start putting some real effort into sharing
>results among robots, or at least agree on some ways to do it. As you
>point out, robots are not only used for indexing purposes, and I think
>that the overcrowding problems will only get worse.
I'm pleased to see that others have been giving consideration to these problems.
I think communication, whether between gatherer robots and a main server in
uploading new items, or between user agents and several information servers,
would be of benefit, both to the end user, and to the Internet in general, as it
might cut down on a lot of wasted searching (and improve the time delay for
new resource discovery).
>I gave talks at the W5C conference and at the W3C distributed indexing
>workshop on exactly this topic, and suggested several courses of action
>including Harvest and RDM:
>
> http://www5conf.inria.fr/fich_html/slides/panels/Panel10/overview.htm
> http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/
> http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/
> http://www.netscape.com/people/dhardy/rdm.html
Yes, I've just been looking at the links you suggested. I think SOIF is a very
detailed mechanism for resource reporting, and should be more than ample for
covering resources (at least a first glance :)
One question I have though. SOIF is refered to as the "Harvest Summary
Object Interchange Format (SOIF)". One concern I have is that for
inter-robot communication to be a success, everyone would need to have
access to it (ie - an open standard). Now, are you, or the Harvest project,
planning to license usage
of this format, or could anyone use it for communication without paying for
incorporating it into there applications?
>[[More content on the W3C workshop should be available soon...]]
That would be great. I started reading, and though... hey... something's
missing :-)
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David Reilly,
Computer Programmer, dodo@fan.net.au
http://www.fan.net.au/~dodo s1523@sand.it.bond.edu.au
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