Wide Area Information Servers

networking, information science (WAIS) A distributed

information retrieval system. WAIS is supported by AppleComputer, Thinking Machines and Dow Jones. Clients are

able to retrieve documents using keywords. The search returns

a list of documents, ranked according to the frequency of

occurrence of the keyword(s) used in the search. The client

can retrieve text or multimedia documents stored on the

server. WAIS offers simple natural language input,

indexed searching for fast retrieval, and a "relevance

feedback" mechanism which allows the results of initial

searches to influence future searches. It uses the ANSIZ39.50 service. Public domain implementations are

available.

Other information retrieval systems include archie,

Gopher, Prospero, and World-Wide Web.

Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.infosystems.wais.

Telnet (telnet://sunsite.unc.edu).

(1995-03-13)