Yelena Yesha

ALIBI: a novel approach to resource discovery

Provides a new answer to the resource discovery problem, which arises because although the Internet makes it possible for users to retrieve enormous amounts of information, it provides insufficient support for locating the specific information that is needed. ALIBI (Adaptive Location of Internetworked Bases of Information) is a new tool that succeeds in locating information without the use of centralized resource catalogs, navigation, or costly searching. Its powerful query‐based interface eliminates the need for the user to connect to one network site after another to find information or to wrestle with overloaded centralized catalogs and archives. This functionality was made possible by an assortment of significant new algorithms and techniques, including classification‐based query routing, fully distributed cooperative caching, and a query language that combines the practicality of Boolean logic with the expressive power of text retrieval. The resulting information system is capable of providing fully automatic resource discovery and retrieval access to a limitless variety of information bases.

The role of the database community in the national information infrastructure

The computer science community is increasingly focusing its efforts on tasks related to the National Information Infrastructure. Hardware and software advances are being sought to make wide-area networks and technological resources in general more useful to mainstream society. With this transition comes a set of unavoidable political and social issues that have never been satisfactorily dealt with in the past. Grand challenges face the computer science community on both the technical and the socio-political sides of this “major upgrade.” This paper discusses various aspects of the enormous coordination problem that faces all of us and considers what the database community can do to help.