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.