Message-Id: <9408301115.AA08160@mocha.bunyip.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 07:18:09 -0400
To: uri@bunyip.com
From: echristi@usgs.gov (Eliot Christian)
I am new to this list, so please forgive any apparent naivete.
I have been working on making it easy for the public to find information
throughout the U.S. Federal government, and have put forward the notion of a
'Government Information Locator Service (GILS)'. This work may also be
carried forward to form the basis of a Global Information Locator
internationally. It strikes me that this should tie in to the work being
done on Uniform Resource Identifiers.
My work with GILS has been concerned with how one might discover the
existence of information resources. I think of GILS as a discipline among
information providers, requiring that some characteristics of information
resources be exhibited into a searchable information space. (Exactly what
characteristics to exhibit is left open, except for the special case of the
GILS Core.)
In GILS, we came to agreement that providers would give textual information
about information resources, and make that textual information available on
the Internet through a search mechanism based on Z39.50. The textual
information takes the form of locator records which optionally include
URI's, either as direct linkages or as cross-reference linkages. As
specified in the GILS Profile, the Internet servers holding GILS locator
records must support searching via a subset of Z39.50 functions, and the
GILS Profile also provides for browsing or hyperlinking. (Thanks to Kevin
Gamiel et al for the cool stuff in the GILS profile.)
So, one might say what we've got here is a big set of grouped URI's, each of
which has a lot of descriptive information attached to it. All that
descriptive information is searchable through a simplified subset of Z39.50
functions. To my mind, this seems like a model for how one might implement
access to Uniform Resource Citations.
I'd sure like to hear any opinions from y'all on GILS, the Global
Information Locator proposal, or possible tie-in's to URI's.
Eliot Christian, US Geological Survey, 802 National Center, Reston VA 22092
echristi@usgs.gov Phone(703)648-7245 FAX(703)648-7069