A Comparison of Internet Resource Discovery Approaches

In the past several years, the number and variety of resources available on the Internet have increased dramatically. With this increase, many new systems have been developed that allow users to search for and access these resources. As these systems begin to interconnect with one another through "information gateways", the conceptual relationships between the systems come into question. Understanding these relationships is important, because they address the degree to which the systems can be made to interoperate seamlessly, without the need for users to learn the details of each system. In this paper we present a taxonomy of approaches to resource discovery. The taxonomy provides insights into the interrelated problems of organizing, browsing, and searching for information. Using this taxonomy, we compare a number of resource discovery systems, and examine several gateways between existing systems.