Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) is aclient–server text searching system that uses theANSI StandardZ39.50 Information Retrieval Service Definition andProtocol Specifications for Library Applications" (Z39.50:1988) to search indexdatabases on remote computers. It was developed in 1990[1] as a project ofThinking Machines,Apple Computer,Dow Jones, andKPMG Peat Marwick.
WAIS did not adhere to either the Z39.50 standard nor itsOSI framework, adopting insteadTCP/IP. It created a unique protocol inspired by Z39.50:1988.
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The WAIS protocol and servers were promoted byThinking Machines Corporation (TMC) ofCambridge, Massachusetts. TMC-produced WAIS servers ran on their massively parallel CM-2 (Connection Machine) andSPARC-based CM-5 MPsupercomputers. WAIS clients were developed for variousoperating systems andwindowing systems includingMicrosoft Windows,Macintosh,NeXT,X,GNU Emacs, and character terminals.[2] TMC released a freeopen source software version of WAIS forUnix in 1991.
Inspired by the WAIS project on full-text databases and emergingSGML 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 funded theClearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) to promote Internet search and discovery systems, open source and standards.[3] 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 suiteIsite based upon Z39.50:1992 usingIsearch as its full-textsearch engine.
Ulrich Pfeifer and Norbert Gövert of the computer science department of theUniversity of Dortmund extended the CNIDR freeWAIS code to become freeWAIS-sf withstructuredfields as its main improvement. Ulrich Pfeifer rewrote freeWAIS-sf inPerl, becoming WAIT.
Inspired by WAIS' "Directory of Servers",Eliot Christian ofUSGS envisioned GILS:Government Information Locator Service. GILS (based upon Z39.50:1992 with some extensions) became a U.S. Federal mandate as part of thePaperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. § 3511).
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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 containingmetadata 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 forGILS and Peter Deutsch'sWHOIS++distributedwhite pagesdirectory.
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Two of the developers of WAIS,Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris, left Thinking Machines to found WAIS Inc in Menlo Park, California, withBruce Gilliat. WAIS Inc. was originally a joint project between Apple Computer, Peat Marwick, Dow Jones, and Thinking Machines. In 1992, the presidential campaign ofRoss Perot used the WAIS product as a campaign wide information system, connecting the field offices to the national office. Later,Perot Systems adopted WAIS to better access the information in its corporate databases. Other early clients were theEnvironmental Protection Agency,Library of Congress, and theDepartment of Energy and later theWall Street Journal andEncyclopædia Britannica.
WAIS Inc was sold toAOL in May 1995 for $15 million.[4] 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 foundAtypon. François Schiettecatte leftHuman Genome Project atJohns Hopkins Hospital and started FS-Consult and developed his own variant of WAIS which eventually became ScienceServer, which was later sold toElsevier Science. Kahle and Gilliat went on to found theInternet Archive andAlexa Internet.
Public WAIS is often used as a full-textsearch engine for individualInternet Gopher servers, supplementing the popularVeronica system which only searches the menu titles of Gopher sites. WAIS and Gopher share theWorld Wide 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. WhileGopher Space is a web containing many loops, the menu system gives the user the impression of a tree.[5][6]
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.[5]
WAIS has kept growing since its start in 1990, and presently, there are over 500 WAIS sources, ...
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