Subject: The ILIAD Knowledge Robot

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 94 17:39:50 EDT

Dear friends,

For many weeks my WAIS server nrao-fits, which indexes FITS-related
documents, has been bombarded with strange search queries coming from
a machine at Johnson Space Center in Texas. At first I ignored the
traffic, but finally I became annoyed enough that I picked up the
telephone and called the network administrator at JSC. I found out
that the origin of the queries is an HPCC project to build a
"knowledge robot" based on Dewey Decimal classification of network
resources (in this case WAIS servers):

    NASA Johnson Space Center's HPCC K-12 Project
    http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/stb/ILIAD/Mosaic/iliad.html

It is conceivable that some variation on the ideas of this project
might be relevant to our general problem of resource discovery in
astronomy.

-Don

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From: [email-masked] (Hans-Martin Adorf)
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 08:42:57 +0100

Dear Don,

you pesumably know this URL:

http://web.nexor.co.uk/mak/doc/robots/robots.html

on WWW Robots, Wanderers and Spiders.

The past few days I have been interested in finding more astronomical WAIS
databases. The CEA maintains two (abstracts/publications and their WWW),
NASA's PDS at least five. I also found the ADASS '93 proceedings and the
ADASS '94 abstract sources.

My collection of astronomical WAIS sources numbers > 60 now, of which about
"only" 40 are listed in our AstroWeb database.

-hma