RFC 1727 (rfc1727) - Page 2 of 11
A Vision of an Integrated Internet Information Service
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1727 Resource Transponders December 1994 etc. Although there are a number of gateways between various protocols, and information service providers are starting to use GOPHER to provide a glue between various services, we are not yet in that golden age when all human information is at our fingertips. (And we're even farther from that platinum age when the computer knows what we're looking for and retrieves it before we even touch the keyboard.) In this paper, we'll propose one possible vision of the information services landscape of the near future, and lay out a plan to get us there from here. 3. Axioms of information services There are a number of unspoken assumptions that we've used in our discussions. It might be useful to lay them out explicitly before we start our exploration. The first is that there is no unique information protocol that will provide the flexibility, scale, responsiveness, worldview, and mix of services that every information consumer wants. A protocol designed to give quick and meaningful access to a collection of stock prices might look functionally very different from one which will search digitized music for a particular musical phrase and deliver it to your workstation. So, rather than design the information protocol to end all information protocols, we will always need to integrate new search engines, new clients, and new delivery paradigms into our grand information service. The second is that distributed systems are a better solution to large-scale information systems than centralized systems. If one million people are publishing electronic papers to the net, should they all have to log on to a single machine to modify the central archives? What kind of bandwidth would be required to that central machine to serve a billion papers a day? If we replicate the central archives, what sort of maintenance problems would be encountered? These questions and a host of others make it seem more profitable at the moment to investigate distributed systems. The third is that users don't want to be bothered with the details of the underlying protocols used to provide a given service. Just as most people don't care whether their e-mail message gets split up into 20 packets and routed through Tokyo to get to its destination, information service users don't care whether the GOPHER server used telnet to get to a WAIS database back-ended by an SQL database. They just want the information. In short, they care very much about how they interact with the client; they just don't want to know what goes on behind. Weider & Deutsch
