A Michael F. Schwartz 

T The Networked Resource Discovery Project 

J Proceedings of the IFIP XI World Congress 
C San Francisco, California 
D August 1989 
P 827-832 

K Track on Communications and distributed systems 

K Early project description, probabilistic yellow pages 

X Available from
ftp:ftp.cs.colorado.edupubcstechreportsschwartzEarly.Pjct.Descr
or
ftp:ftp.cs.colorado.edupubcstechreportsschwartzEarly.Pjct.Descr.txt.Z 

X Abstract:  "Large scale computer networks provide access to a
bewilderingly large number and variety of resources, including
retail products, network services, and people in various
capacities.  We consider the problem of allowing users to
\fIdiscover the existence\fR of such resources in an
administratively decentralized environment, using a system
architecture that accesses the distributed collection of
repositories that naturally maintain resource information.  A key
problem is organizing the resource space flexibly.  Rather than
imposing a hierarchical organization, our approach allows the
resource space organization to evolve in accordance with usage
patterns. Concretely, a set of \fIagents\fR organize and search
the resource space by constructing links between the repositories
of resource information based on keywords that describe the
contents of each repository, and the semantics of the resources
being sought.  The links form a general graph, with a flexible
set of hierarchies embedded within the grh to provide some
measure of scalability.  The graph structure evolves over time
through the use of cache aging protocols. Additional scalability
is targeted through the use of probabilistic graph protocols.  A
simulation, prototype implementation, and measurement study are
under way."