Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) is a
client–server text searching system that uses the
ANSI
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) 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 organi ...
Standard
Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and
Protocol
Protocol may refer to:
Sociology and politics
* Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states
* Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state
* Etiquette, a code of personal behavior
Science and technolog ...
Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
s on remote computers. It was developed in 1990 as a project of
Thinking Machines
Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuse ...
,
Apple Computer,
Dow Jones, and
KPMG
KPMG International Limited (or simply KPMG) is a multinational professional services network, and one of the Big Four accounting organizations.
Headquartered in Amstelveen, Netherlands, although incorporated in London, England, KPMG is a net ...
Peat Marwick.
WAIS did not adhere to either the standard nor its
OSI framework (adopting instead TCP/IP) but created a unique protocol inspired by Z39.50:1988.
History
The WAIS protocol and servers were promoted by
Thinking Machines Corporation
Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusett ...
(TMC) of
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...
. TMC-produced WAIS servers ran on their massively parallel CM-2 (
Connection Machine
A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...
) and
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...
-based CM-5 MP
supercomputers. WAIS clients were developed for various
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
s and
windowing system
In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm fo ...
s including
Microsoft Windows,
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
,
NeXT
Next may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film
* ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare
* ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage
* '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film
Lit ...
,
X,
GNU Emacs
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of ...
, and character terminals. TMC released a free
open source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
version of WAIS for
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
in 1991.
Inspired by the WAIS project on full-text databases and emerging
SGML projects, Z39.50 version 2 (Z39.50:1992) was released. Unlike its 1988 predecessor, it was a compatible superset of the international ISO 10162/10163 standard.
With the advent of Z39.50:1992, the termination of support for free WAIS by Thinking Machines and the establishment of WAIS Inc as a commercial venture, the U.S.
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
funded the
Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval The Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval or CNIDR was an organization funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation from 1993 to 1997 and based at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) in Research Triangle ...
(CNIDR) to promote Internet search and discovery systems, open source and standards. CNIDR created a new, free open-source WAIS. This was the first freeWAIS based on the wais-8-b5 codebase of TMC, with a wholly new software suite
Isite based upon Z39.50:1992 using
Isearch
Isearch is open-source text retrieval software first developed in 1994 by Nassib Nassar as part of the Isite Z39.50 information framework. The project started at the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) of t ...
as its full-text
search engine.
Ulrich Pfeifer and Norbert Gövert of the computer science department of the
University of Dortmund
TU Dortmund University (german: Technische Universität Dortmund) is a technical university in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with over 35,000 students, and over 6,000 staff including 300 professors, offering around 80 Bachelor's and ...
extended the CNIDR freeWAIS code to become freeWAIS-sf with structured fields as its main improvement. Ulrich Pfeifer rewrote freeWAIS-sf in
Perl
Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...
, becoming WAIT.
Inspired by WAIS' "Directory of Servers",
Eliot Christian of
USGS
The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, a ...
envisioned GILS:
Government Information Locator Service. GILS (based upon Z39.50:1992 with some extensions) became a U.S. Federal mandate as part of the
Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 ().
Directory of Servers
Thinking Machines Corp provided a service called the Directory of Servers. It was a WAIS server like any other information source except containing information about the other WAIS servers on the Internet. A WAIS server with TMC WAIS code creates a special record containing
metadata plus some common words describing its indexed content. The record is uploaded to the central server and indexed along with the records from other public servers. The directory can be searched 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 model for
GILS and Peter Deutsch's
WHOIS++ distributed Distribution may refer to:
Mathematics
*Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations
*Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a varia ...
white pages
A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization tha ...
directory
Directory may refer to:
* Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files
* Directory (OpenVMS command)
* Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network's u ...
.
People
Two of the developers of WAIS,
Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris, left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California with
Bruce Gilliat
Bruce Gilliat (born May 30, 1959) is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
...
. WAIS Inc. was originally a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Markwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines. In 1992, the presidential campaign of
Ross Perot used the WAIS product as a campaign wide information system, connecting the field offices to the national office. Later,
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. Perot Systems provided information technology services in the industries of health ...
adopted WAIS to better access the information in its corporate databases. Other early clients were the
Environmental Protection Agency,
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...
, and the
Department of Energy A Ministry of Energy or Department of Energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-re ...
and later the ''
Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' and ''
Encyclopædia Britannica
The (Latin for "British Encyclopædia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It is published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; the company has existed since the 18th century, although it has changed ownership various t ...
''.
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. Georgios Papadopoulos left to found
Atypon
Atypon Systems, LLC, is an online publishing platform provider for publishers and other providers of scientific, technical, medical, scholarly, professional and government content. It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It has been owned ...
. François Schiettecatte left
Human Genome Project at
Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. It was founded in 1889 using money from a bequest of over $7 million (1873 m ...
and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer, which was later sold to
Elsevier Science
Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', the ...
. Kahle and Gilliat went on to found the
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
and
Alexa Internet.
WAIS and Gopher
Public WAIS is often used as a full-text
search engine for individual
Internet Gopher
The Gopher protocol () is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to ...
servers, supplementing the popular
Veronica system which only searches the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through 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
The Gopher protocol () is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to ...
is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.
[Berners-Lee, Tim. "The World-Wide Web". ''The New Media Reader''. The MIT Press.]
The Web's 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 Web's hypertext model permits the author more freedom to communicate the options available to the reader, as it can include headings and various forms of list structure.
References
External links
Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) launch lecture(Xerox PARC, 1991)
RFC1625: WAIS over Z39.50-1988M. St. Pierre, J. Fullton, K. Gamiel, J. Goldman, B. Kahle, J. Kunze, H. Morris, F. Schiettecatte, June 1994
RFC 4156: The wais URI Scheme P. Hoffman, August 2005
Clifford A. Lynch
Clifford Lynch is the director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), where he has been since 1997. He is also an adjunct professor at Berkeley's School of Information.
Career and awards
Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent eighteen years ...
, ''D-Lib'' Magazine, April 1997
*Usage of WHOIS through the ''swais'' command:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wide Area Information Server
Internet Standards
Unix network-related software
Internet protocols
Internet search engines
Gopher (protocol)