HOW THE INFORMATION IS STRUCTURED
The information is categorised. For example, all the items of information
which are to do with networks are classified under `networks', and
all the items of information to do with the aconet network are in
the sub-category `aconet'. An example of three categories (COSINE,
Networks and Services) is shown below. The `COSINE' category has information
on the various COSINE sub-projects (eg. CONCISE and PARADISE) and
also the COSINE specification documents. The `Networks' category has
information on the European networks (eg. aconet, dfn, janet). The
`Services' category has information on the electronic services available
over the networks (eg. netnews is a bulletin board, niss is an interactive
information server, and trickle is a file-server).
COSINE Networks Services
- concise - aconet - netnews
- paradise - dfn - niss
- specs - janet - trickle
The sub-categories may themselves be further divided into sub- categories,
and so on. For example, `specs' is a sub-category of `cosine' which
has many items of information beneath it, each of them is one of the
specification documents of the COSINE project.
Each item of information and each category has a name eg. `dfn', or
`Networks'. The items have another name, called a `pathname'; this
is a list of all the categories above it separated by slashes eg.
/Networks/dfn. The single word name is unique within the particular
category, but may not necessarily be unique in the whole of CONCISE.
The pathname, however, is unique in the whole system.
Some items of information can be put into two or more classifications.
For example, the NISS information server shown in the example under
`Services' is on the JANET network, and so would also be classified
under `janet'. Things like this may be found classified under both.
Each item has a pathname which reflects the categories under which
it is classified. For example, the aconet network in the example above
has the pathname /Networks/aconet, the CONCISE information service
has information on itself under `concise' which is named /COSINE/concise.