The Knowbot Information Service (KIS), also known as netaddress, provides a uniform user interface to a variety of remote directory services such as whois

WHOIS

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores...

, finger

Finger protocol

In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information.-Name/Finger protocol:...

, X.500

X.500

X.500 is a series of computer networking standards covering electronic directory services. The X.500 series was developed by ITU-T, formerly known as CCITT, and first approved in 1988. The directory services were developed in order to support the requirements of X.400 electronic mail exchange and...

, MCIMail. By submitting a single query to KIS, a user can search a set of remote white pages services and see the results of the search in a uniform format.

There are several interfaces to the KIS service including e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 and telnet

TELNET

Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection...

. Another KIS interface imitates the Berkeley whois command.

KIS consists of two distinct types of modules which interact with each other (typically across a network) to provide the service. One module is a user agent module that runs on the KIS mail host machine. The second module is a remote server module (possibly on a different machine) that interrogates various database services across the network and provides the results to the user agent module in a uniform fashion. Interactions between the two modules can be via messages between Knowbots or by actual movement of Knowbots.

External links

• http://www.ou.edu/research/electron/internet/knowbot.htm
• http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/home/koe/index.html