Widely distributed searching

[Paul Barker <[e-mail]>]

Greetings,

    I was talking to Steve Hardcastle-Kille the other day about the
prospects of X.500.  He relayed to me that he'd recently spoken to someone 
who had been gung-ho about the distributed directory, but who had "lost the
faith".  Well, that's funny I said, as I've recently been surprised by how
well it can work.

The basis for this belief is that I have added a new feature to the DE
interface (available as the PARADISE service) which allows for multiple
organisation searching, or power searching as someone has coined it.  This
allows you to search for Bloggs within a country, when you do not know the
organisation the person works for.  To be honest, I was surprised at how
well this type of search works - certainly surpised at how quickly I got
some results.  You certainly don't want to do this type
of multi-cast search for normal queries, but it seems to me to be a very
valuable facility when you really are stuck for the organisation name.  I
have been able to find all sorts of people who I previously had no way of
finding.

I certainly wouldn't pretend that the current approach is not without
scaling difficulties, but I believe it works well enough at the moment to
encourage people to use the Directory, when many are disuaded by the
decisions which are usually forced on users by the DIT hierarchy.

The software will be available as a package soon, both over the Quipu API
and over University of MIchigan's LDAP.  In the meantime, you can try the 
service on one of the PARADISE project's machines.  Do let me know what you 
think.

Paul
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