Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1992 18:57:19 +0300 Message-Id: <199206031557.AA18097@lusmu.cs.hut.fi> From: Jyrki Kuoppala <jkp@cs.hut.fi> To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch Subject: Virtual newsgroups and creating the memory of Usenet via www and wais Here's an article I sent a while ago to various Usenet newsgroups: >With the enormous numbers of groups now existing, tracking >through all of them to find interesting and relevant topics >is becoming very hard, and it seems clear that the namespace >is becoming hopelessly muddled by democracy in action, so >a software solution might be the only way out. An idea just popped up in my head. Currently we have a news gateway to www (a www client can be used as a newsreader), which helps to organized groups better than the flat namespace of the newsgroups most other newsreaders seem to have. Ie. you create www nodes which have topically similar newsgroups listed together in a node and hypetext links to those newsgroups. Each user can make personal nodes having the groups or use ones someone else has published on the net. Now, as www works very well with dynamic node creation (which is the way the nntp and wais gateways work), to have a "virtual newsgroup" you would just instead of having a link to a "real" newsgroup in a www node have a link to a FIND node with suitable keywords, and then wais would be used to search the articles mathing the find criteria and would create a virtual node for the matches, like the nntp gateway currently creates a virtual node with the current contents of a real Usenet group. As the www news client / gateway already has the capability to follow links to earlier dicussions (References: field), following the tree from the virtual newsgroups would be easy. For more usability, the www / news gateway (or the news system) should also create forward references, ie. to backtrack the References field when new articles come in and thus keep track of articles which are comments to a certain article. To apply the same principles to other newsreaders, nntp should be extended to have the "newsgroup" instead be a "search criteria", which would be interpreted by the wais (or some other search engine) server and transparent to nntpd (except if it's the old-fashioned newsgroup name). People would have the search criteria - keywords from the text, poster names, whatever - in their .newsrc files alongside with the newsgroup names. I'm not sure how to keep track of what articles the user has already read, as there are no article numbers for the virtual groups. Keeping track of message IDs takes a lot of space. But even as a browsing tool it would be nice. Hmm, come to think of it to combine a wais server indexing the news database with the www / nntp gateway seems like the obvious thing to do, so somebody must have done it already? Also, are there any anonymous nntp servers which function as archives for some or all of the groups, ie have long-term storage available by nntp? CD-ROM online or something. With the www news gateway and some minor modifications for some purposes saving an interesting article to local disk would be unnecssary, instead just the message ID would be saved (or added to a node on an organized www document so one could find it later) and the article could later be found on a generic nntp archive. To save bandwidth and avoid single points of failure the nntp archive could be a distributed database with servers on various parts of the world and cooperation and caching between them - the servers could compute a hash from the message ID and archive a certain percentage of the article. With some coordination the burden of disk space could be shared so there needn't be one gigantic nntp archive. //Jyrki