Scalable Internet Resource Discovery: Research Problems and

Approaches

C. Mic Bowman

Transarc Corp.

The Gulf Tower

707 Grant Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15219

+1 412 338 6752

mic@transarc.com

Peter B. Danzig

Computer Science Department

University of Southern California

941 W. 37th Place

Los Angeles, California 90089-0781

+1 213 740 4780

danzig@usc.edu

Udi Manber

Computer Science Department

University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona 85721

+1 602 621 4317

udi@cs.arizona.edu

Michael F. Schwartz

Computer Science Department

University of Colorado

Boulder, Colorado 80309-0430

+1 303 492 3902

schwartz@cs.colorado.edu

February 23, 1994

Abstract

Over the past several years, a number of information discovery and access tools have been introduced in the Internet, including Archie, Gopher, Netfind, and WAIS. These tools have become quite popular, and are helping to redefine how people think about wide-area network applications. Yet, they are not well suited to supporting the future information infrastructure, which will be characterized by enormous data volume, rapid growth in the user base, and burgeoning data diversity. In this paper we indicate trends in these three dimensions and survey problems these trends will create for current approaches. We then suggest several promising directions of future resource discovery research, along with some initial results from projects carried out by members of the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service.

1 Introduction

In its roots as the ARPANET, the Internet was conceived primarily as a means of remote login and experimentation with data communication protocols. However, the predominate usage quickly