CPSC 547 - Project I

The Internet as a Research Tool

Research through the Internet is becoming increasingly practical every day. The convergence of the internet's information repository to the world wide web and the introduction of more and more powerful search engines make it an invaluable source of data. The various tools available on the internet each have their own uses in research. Strengths and weaknesses are inherent in each one of them:

• World Wide Web
• Archie
• FTP
• Gopher
• List Servers
• Talk
• Internet Relay Chat
• Email
• Newgroups

Our Research

In our sample research on intelligent agents, we found the world wide web to be our primary source of information. Using the Alta-Vista search engine, we found many pages devoted to intelligent agent theory, research, and specific developments. MetaCrawler and Lycos both turned up large numbers of web pages, but there didn't seem to be any subtopic that they could locate that Alta-Vista couldn't also locate. FTP was the only other tool we actually got any practical use out of in retrieving agent programs, but even that tool was integrated into the web browser so that it didn't seem like an external entity. Email was, of course, used to communicate amongst our research group as well. Had our research required communication beyond our group to other researchers, then the other communication tools (news, list servers, IRC) might have found some use. There were several newsgroups that turned up in Alta-Vista's usenet search, but they were not particularly useful. If we had a difficult question, the comp.ai group would be an obvious resource to draw upon. It is difficult to imagine using a MUD for research purposes unless an atypical one has been developed to facilitate a natural communication environment amongst the researchers. Even gopher and Archie, although useful in the past, are becoming obsolete as the WWW and its various search engines replace them.