About This Part of the Web

This is a description of how this part of the web was constructed, and contains a description of the gateways, converters and servers that we use to provide the RFCs, man pages and info gateways.

What is this part of the web?

This part of the web is the on-line help system for the Computer and Information Science Department at The Ohio State University, which has been running in some form or another since November of 1992 (we get much more traffic now than we did back then). Here are some statistics from Tom Fine's script or if you prefer wwwstat. We have a large distributed workstation environment consisting of Sun, HP and SGI workstations and various file servers. We decided to use distributed information search/display technology like W3 and WAIS because

it allows us to tap into the wealth of info available elsewhere,
it allows us to easily make information available to others,
it provides a nice platform for developing simple hypertext systems.

We are trying to make our existing documentation available as W3 hypertext, and we are trying to make it searchable through WAIS. This existing documentation includes man pages, Usenet FAQs, Internet RFCs and IENs, Emacs INFO, and various manuals that we've written in LaTeX and Frame. We are trying to create tools that will allow us to automatically convert these documents from their original formats into W3 HTML, automatically creating hypertext links where they make sense and so on. We are also planning on writing a bunch of new documentation, including a staff procedures guide and a common problem/solutions cookbook for the system operators. These will be searchable via WAIS.

What tools are we using?

We are using the stock http daemon from NCSA (V1.4) and freeWAIS-sf.

What tools have we written?

Tom Fine has written a text-mode browser in Perl, and is working on an editor. Steve Romig has written Perl scripts that convert UNIX man pages and Internet RFCs and IENs into HTML.

Last update: 27-Jul-95 by KMB