Wide area information server
Encyclopedia
Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client–server text searching system that uses the ANSI
Standard Z39.50
Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index database
s on remote computers. It was developed in the late 1980s as a project of Thinking Machines, Apple Computer
, Dow Jones, and KPMG
Peat Marwick.
WAIS did not adhere to either the standard or its OSI framework
(adopting instead TCP/IP) but created a unique protocol inspired by Z39.50:1988.
. TMC produced WAIS servers which ran on their massively parallel CM-2 (Connection Machine
) and SPARC
-based CM-5 MP supercomputer
s. WAIS clients were developed for various operating system
s including Microsoft Windows
, Macintosh
, NeXT
and UNIX
. TMC, however, released a free open source
version of WAIS to run on Unix
in 1991.
Inspired by the WAIS project on full text databases and emerging SGML projects Z39.50 version 2 or Z39.50:1992 was released. Unlike its 1988 predecessor it was a compatible superset of the ISO 10162/10163 work that had been done internationally.
With the advent of Z39.50:1992, the termination of support for the free WAIS from Thinking Machines and the establishment of WAIS Inc as a commercial venture, the U.S. National Science Foundation
funded CNIDR to create a clearinghouse of information related to Internet search and discovery systems and to promote open source and standards. CNIDR created a new freely available open-source WAIS. This created first the freeWAIS package based on the wais-8-b5 codebase implemented by Thinking Machines Corp and then a wholly new software suite Isite based upon Z39.50:1992 with Isearch
as its full text search engine.
Ulrich Pfeifer and Norbert Gövert of the computer science department of the University of Dortmund took the CNIDR freeWAIS code and extended it to become freeWAIS-sf: sf means structured fields and indicated its main improvement. Ulrich Pfeifer rewrote freeWAIS-sf in Perl where it became WAIT.hgfhh
Inspired also by WAIS, especially its "Directory of Servers", Eliot Christian of USGS envisioned GILS: Government Information Locator Service. GILS (based upon Z39.50:1992 with some WAIS-like extensions) became a U.S. Federal mandate as part of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995
.
white pages directory
.
and Harry Morris, left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California with Bruce Gilliat
. WAIS Inc. was originally developed as a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Markwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines. In 1992, the presidential campaign of Ross Perot
used WAIS as a campaign wide information system, connecting the field offices to the national office. Later, Perot Systems
adopted WAIS to better access the information in its corporate databases. Other early clients were the Environmental Protection Agency, Library of Congress
, and the Department of Energy
and later the Wall Street Journal and Encyclopædia Britannica
.
WAIS Inc was sold to AOL
in May 1995 for $15 million. Following the sale, Margaret St. Pierre left WAIS Inc to start Blue Angel Technologies. Her "WAIS variant" formed the basis of MetaStar. François Schiettecatte left Human Genome Project
at Johns Hopkins Hospital
and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer, which was later sold to Elsevier Science. Kahle and Gilliat went on to found the Internet Archive
and Alexa Internet
.
system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the World Wide Web
's client–server architecture and a certain amount of its functionality. The WAIS protocol is influenced largely by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. It allows a text-based search, and retrieval following a search. Gopher provides a free text search mechanism, but principally uses menus. A menu is a list of titles, from which the user may pick one. While gopher space is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.
The W3 data model is similar to the gopher model, except that menus are generalized to hypertext documents. In both cases, simple file servers generate the menus or hypertext directly from the file structure of a server. The W3 hypertext model gives the program more power to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure.
American National Standards Institute
The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...
Standard Z39.50
Z39.50
Z39.50 is a client–server protocol for searching and retrieving information from remote computer databases. It is covered by ANSI/NISO standard Z39.50, and ISO standard 23950. The standard's maintenance agency is the Library of Congress....
Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
s on remote computers. It was developed in the late 1980s as a project of Thinking Machines, Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
, Dow Jones, and KPMG
KPMG
KPMG is one of the largest professional services networks in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PwC. Its global headquarters is located in Amstelveen, Netherlands....
Peat Marwick.
WAIS did not adhere to either the standard or its OSI framework
OSI model
The Open Systems Interconnection model is a product of the Open Systems Interconnection effort at the International Organization for Standardization. It is a prescription of characterizing and standardizing the functions of a communications system in terms of abstraction layers. Similar...
(adopting instead TCP/IP) but created a unique protocol inspired by Z39.50:1988.
History
The WAIS protocol and servers were primarily promoted by Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) of Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. TMC produced WAIS servers which ran on their massively parallel CM-2 (Connection Machine
Connection Machine
The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis' research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation...
) and SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
-based CM-5 MP supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
s. WAIS clients were developed for various operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s including Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, Macintosh
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
, NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
and UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
. TMC, however, released a free open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
version of WAIS to run on Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
in 1991.
Inspired by the WAIS project on full text databases and emerging SGML projects Z39.50 version 2 or Z39.50:1992 was released. Unlike its 1988 predecessor it was a compatible superset of the ISO 10162/10163 work that had been done internationally.
With the advent of Z39.50:1992, the termination of support for the free WAIS from Thinking Machines and the establishment of WAIS Inc as a commercial venture, the U.S. National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
funded CNIDR to create a clearinghouse of information related to Internet search and discovery systems and to promote open source and standards. CNIDR created a new freely available open-source WAIS. This created first the freeWAIS package based on the wais-8-b5 codebase implemented by Thinking Machines Corp and then a wholly new software suite Isite based upon Z39.50:1992 with Isearch
Isearch
Isearch is open-source text retrieval software first developed in 1994 as part of the Isite Z39.50 information framework. The project started at the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval of the North Carolina supercomputing center MCNC and funded by the National Science...
as its full text search engine.
Ulrich Pfeifer and Norbert Gövert of the computer science department of the University of Dortmund took the CNIDR freeWAIS code and extended it to become freeWAIS-sf: sf means structured fields and indicated its main improvement. Ulrich Pfeifer rewrote freeWAIS-sf in Perl where it became WAIT.hgfhh
Inspired also by WAIS, especially its "Directory of Servers", Eliot Christian of USGS envisioned GILS: Government Information Locator Service. GILS (based upon Z39.50:1992 with some WAIS-like extensions) became a U.S. Federal mandate as part of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995
Paperwork Reduction Act
The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, Pub. L. No. 96-511, 94 Stat. 2812 , codified in part at Subchapter I of Chapter 35 of Title 44 of the United States Code, through , is a United States federal law enacted in 1980 that gave authority over the collection of certain information to the Office of...
.
Directory of Servers
Thinking Machines Corp provided a service called the Directory of Servers. It was a WAIS server like any other information source but contained information about the other WAIS servers on the Internet. When one would create a WAIS server with the TMC WAIS code it would create a special kind of record containing metadata and some common words to describe the content of the index. It would be uploaded to the central server and indexed along with the records from other public servers. One could search the directory to find servers that might have content relevant to a specific field of interest. This model of searching for (WAIS) servers to search became the role model for GILS and Peter Deutsch's WHOIS++ distributedDistributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
white pages directory
Directory
Directory may refer to:* Directory , or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files* Directory , stored information about a database...
.
People
Two of the developers of WAIS, Brewster KahleBrewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian.- Biography :Kahle graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The...
and Harry Morris, left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California with Bruce Gilliat
Bruce Gilliat
-References:...
. WAIS Inc. was originally developed as a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Markwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines. In 1992, the presidential campaign of Ross Perot
Ross Perot
Henry Ross Perot is a U.S. businessman best known for running for President of the United States in 1992 and 1996. Perot founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962, sold the company to General Motors in 1984, and founded Perot Systems in 1988...
used WAIS as a campaign wide information system, connecting the field offices to the national office. Later, Perot Systems
Perot Systems
Perot Systems was an information technology services provider founded in 1988 by a group of investors led by Ross Perot and based in Plano, Texas, United States. A Fortune 1000 corporation with offices in more than 25 countries, Perot Systems employed more than 23,000 people and had an annual...
adopted WAIS to better access the information in its corporate databases. Other early clients were the Environmental Protection Agency, Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
, and the Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material...
and later the Wall Street Journal and Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
.
WAIS Inc was sold to AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
in May 1995 for $15 million. Following the sale, Margaret St. Pierre left WAIS Inc to start Blue Angel Technologies. Her "WAIS variant" formed the basis of MetaStar. François Schiettecatte left Human Genome Project
Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project is an international scientific research project with a primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, and of identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional...
at Johns Hopkins Hospital
Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...
and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer, which was later sold to Elsevier Science. Kahle and Gilliat went on to found the Internet Archive
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
and Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...
.
WAIS and Gopher
Public WAIS was often used as a full text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers, supplementing the popular VeronicaVeronica (computer)
Veronica is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.Veronica is a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of Gopher servers...
system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
's client–server architecture and a certain amount of its functionality. The WAIS protocol is influenced largely by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. It allows a text-based search, and retrieval following a search. Gopher provides a free text search mechanism, but principally uses menus. A menu is a list of titles, from which the user may pick one. While gopher space is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.
The W3 data model is similar to the gopher model, except that menus are generalized to hypertext documents. In both cases, simple file servers generate the menus or hypertext directly from the file structure of a server. The W3 hypertext model gives the program more power to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure.