Re: Widely distributed searching

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Paul:
   One of the primary problems I have with the X.500 standard, irrespective
of the various implementations, is that it locks the user into the X.500
namespace, and the user has to know a great deal about the layout of the 
namespace if she wants to issue more than local queries. So even the power
search option is not sufficient for Yellow Pages type queries, and I have some
*extreme* concerns about how this concept will scale. 

The Yellow Pages problem is actually extremely difficult to solve in X.500.
Either one has to munge the namespace to contain all the relevant attributes
for searching (as in @o=Internet@ou=K-12 Information) which is a horrible hack,
even if everything under this subtree uses aliases, it's still next to imposs-
ible to maintain, especially when the entry has been moved out from under
the alias. The other way is to create relevant subtrees under each 
organization's entry (for example, for K-12 Educators who work for IBM)
However, in either case, you are forcing the user to be aware of the
layout of the name space to get at the information they really want.

I think that the whois++ stuff solves these problems quite nicely, as many of
the solutions fall right out of the architecture. 

Chris