Subject: new WWW-to-WAIS gateway - did you see this?

From: [email-masked] (Hans-Martin Adorf)
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 1994 11:35:26 +0100

Beta Testers needed!

We are working on a new WWW-to-WAIS Gateway called WAISGATE.  We are
starting to play around with the user interface now that we have the
underlying plumbing working and would like comments and dreams on how this
might be done.  The software will continue to evolve over time.

Please try:
  http://server.wais.com/directory-of-servers.html
and:
  http://server.wais.com/comp.infosystems.www.html
  http://server.wais.com/comp.infosystems.wais.html
  http://server.wais.com/comp.infosystems.gopher.html

Note: WAISGATE requires a Web viewer that handles forms (such as Mosaic 2.x).

Features of WAISGATE:
 - Ability to access remote WAIS databases.
 - Multi-type documents with associated icons for each document format.
 - Table-lookup conversion from WAIS Types to MIME Content Types.
 - Fielded search for commercial WAIS databases.
 - Single-step processing: search of directory-of-servers, to database
   search, and to document retrieval.

Some examples of the use of WAISGATE are:

 1. Visit the directory-of-servers URL.  Enter the search term
"Smithsonian" and select the "smithsonian-pictures.src" database.  Next,
enter the search term: "gor*".  (The "*" is an example of using right
truncation.)  Select either the text, the thumbnail image, or the full
image documents for retrieval.

 2. To try out fielded search, use the URL's:
"http://server.wais.com/comp.infosystems.gopher.html",
"http://server.wais.com/comp.infosystems.wais.html", and
"http://server.wais.com/comp.infosystems.www.html".  
These are HTML pages for searching the Gopher, WAIS, and WWW newsgroup
archives, respectively, using the commercial WAIS server.  The "Complete
Text Search Terms" is where you may enter your WAIS question.  If you wish
to restrict your search to specific fields within the mail archive, such as
"subject" or "from", enter you search terms in the corresponding search
box.  When you have completed entering in your search terms, use the
"Submit Query" box to process the search.

Special thanks to Francois Schiettecatte and the Smithsonian Institution
for the use of the Smithsonian Pictures Database, and to Steven E. Brenner
for the Perl Library routines.  Thanks to NCSA for the very nice public
domain HTTP daemon and the associated icons.

This will run as a free service on the Web.  Please send comments to
[email-masked].

 - Your friends at WAIS Incorporated