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.

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.

This paper explores an attribute-based approach to storing information in the context of a #le system that supports extended attributes about #les and a mechanism to manipulate #les based on logical queries and comparisons of attributes. The novel aspects of our system are that it is sophisticated enough to operate as a user's primary method of interaction with the operating system and that it supports derived attributes whose values are derived at look-up time. Organizational mechanisms are explored to aid in the navigation of the system. We implemented our system as a user-level NFS server that supports attribute-based naming of #les and other objects. We discuss its details, our experiences with it and performance comparisons between it and a traditional hierarchical #le system. *Current address: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Mountain View, CA. 1 1 Introduction As an increasing amount of information reaches our computers the problem of managing information becomes more import...