Wide area information server

Wide Area Information Servers or WAIS is a client-server text searching system that uses the ANSI Standard Z39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition and Protocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search index databases on remote computers. It was developed in the late 1980s as a project of Thinking Machines, Apple Computer, Dow Jones, and KPMG 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.

The WAIS protocol and servers were primarily promoted by Thinking Machines Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thinking Machines produced WAIS servers which ran on their massively parallel CM-2 (connection machine) and SPARC-based CM-5 MP supercomputers. WAIS clients were developed for various operating systems including Windows, Macintosh, NeXT and UNIX. TMC, however, released a free open source version of WAIS to run on Unix in 1991.

Inspired by the WAIS project on full text databases and emerging SGML projects Z39.50 version 2 or Z39.50:1992 was released. Unlike its 1988 predecessor it was a compatible superset of the ISO 10162/10163 work that had been done internationally.

With the advent of Z39.50:1992, the termination of support for the free WAIS from Thinking Machines and the establishment of WAIS Inc as a commercial venture (their WAIS was written to use the Fulcrum fulltext engine), the U.S. National Science Foundation funded CNIDR to create a clearinghouse of information related to Internet search and discovery systems and to promote open source and standards. CNIDR created a new freely available open-source WAIS. This created first the freeWAIS package based on the wais-8-b5 codebase implemented by Thinking Machines Corp and then a wholly new software suite Isite based upon Z39.50:1992 with Isearch as its full text search engine.

Ulrich Pfeifer and Norbert Gövert of the computer science department of the University of Dortmund took the CNIDR freeWAIS code and extended it to become freeWAIS-sf: sf means structured fields and indicated its main improvement. Ulrich Pfeifer rewrote freeWAIS-sf in Perl where it became WAIT.

Inspired also by WAIS, especially its "Directory of Servers", Eliot Christian of USGS envisioned GILS: Government Information Locator Service. GILS (based upon Z39.50:1992 with some WAIS-like extensions) became a U.S. Federal mandate as part of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. 3511).

Directory of Servers

Thinking Machines Corp provided a service called the Directory of Servers. It was a WAIS server like any other information source but contained information about the other WAIS servers on the Internet. When one would create a WAIS server with the TMC WAIS code it would create a special kind of record containing metadata and some common words to describe the content of the index. It would be uploaded to the central server and indexed along with the records from other public servers. One could search the directory 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 role model for GILS and Peter Deutsch's WHOIS++ distributed white pages directory.

People

One of the developers of WAIS was Brewster Kahle, who left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California with Bruce Gilliat. After selling WAIS to AOL in May 1995 for $15 million, Kahle and Gilliat founded the Internet Archive and then Alexa Internet. Following the sale Margaret St. Pierre left WAIS Inc to start Blue Angel Technologies. Her "WAIS variant" formed the basis of MetaStar. François Schiettecatte left Human Genome Project at Johns Hopkins Hospital and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer—a product later sold to Elsevier Science.

WAIS and Gopher

Public WAIS was often used as a full text search engine for individual Internet Gopher servers, supplementing the popular Veronica system which only searched the menu titles of Gopher sites.

References

* [http://rfc.net/rfc1625.html RFC1625] WAIS over Z39.50-1988 M. St. Pierre, J. Fullton, K. Gamiel, J. Goldman, B. Kahle, J. Kunze, H. Morris, F. Schiettecatte
* [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april97/04lynch.html The Z39.50 Information Retrieval Standard Part I: A Strategic View of Its Past, Present and Future, Clifford A. Lynch D-Lib Magazine, April 1997]

External links

* [http://www.archive.org/details/wais_supercomputer_parc Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) launch lecture (1991)]