Wide area information server

History and Development of WAIS - WAIS protocol and servers were promoted by Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) of Cambridge, Massachusetts. - TMC-produced WAIS servers ran on their massively parallel CM-2 and SPARC-based CM-5 MP supercomputers. - WAIS clients were developed for various operating systems and windowing systems. - TMC released a free open source software version of WAIS for Unix in 1991. - Z39.50 version 2 (Z39.50:1992) was released, which was a compatible superset of the international ISO 10162/10163 standard. Directory of Servers - Thinking Machines Corp provided a service called the Directory of Servers. - The Directory of Servers contained information about other WAIS servers on the Internet. - WAIS servers created special records containing metadata and common words describing their indexed content. - The directory could be searched to find servers relevant to a specific field of interest. - This model of searching for servers became the model for GILS and WHOIS++. People - Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc. - WAIS Inc. was originally a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Markwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines. - Ross Perot's presidential campaign used the WAIS product as an information system. - WAIS Inc was sold to AOL in May 1995 for $15 million. - Margaret St. Pierre, Georgios Papadopoulos, and François Schiettecatte left WAIS Inc to start their own ventures. WAIS and Gopher - Public WAIS is often used as a full-text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers. - WAIS and Gopher share the client-server architecture and some functionality. - The WAIS protocol is influenced by the z39.50 protocol designed for networking library catalogs. - Gopher provides a free text search mechanism but primarily uses menus. - The Webs data model is similar to the gopher model, but hypertext documents replace menus. References and Further Information - WAIS has grown since its start in 1990, with over 500 WAIS sources. - A study on distributed systems of information servers involving WAIS. - The National Science Foundation funded the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR). - AOL acquired WAIS Inc in 1995. - Various publications and books provide further information on WAIS.