Information Resources

The major use of the Internet is to find information. There are six major ways to find and achieve information:

• FTP: File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is the underlying set of specifications that support Internet file transfer. In other words, FTP is a service that allows us to copy a file from any Internet host to any other Internet host. A ftp program acts as a client and connects to the FTP server on a remote host. Internet users can download (copy files from the remote computer into users' computer) and upload (copy files from users' computer to a remote computer) files. An anonymous FTP site permits any Internet user to login using anonymous as the account name and a user's mailing address as the password.

• Archie: Throughout the Internet, there are a number of computers, called Archie servers, which provide a service to help users find the name of Anonymous FTP hosts that carry a particular file. Archie is a tool that allows users to search most of the publicly available anonymous FTP sites worldwide for specific files of interest.

• Gopher: The Gopher is a powerful system that allows users to access many resources of the Internet in a simple, consistent manner. To use the Gopher, all users need to do are making selections from a menu. In other words, Gopher is a menu-based tool that enables users to search for publicly available information posted on the Internet. The power of the Gopher lies in the fact that the resources listed in a menu may be anywhere on the Internet.

• Veronica: Veronica is a Gopher-based resource that users can use to search gopherspace for all the menu items that contain specified words. Veronica is to Gopher what Archie is to FTP. It enables users to search all publicly available Gopher sites by specifying key words.

• World Wide Web: WWW (World Wide Web) or simply Web is one type of information resource that is growing even faster than Internet itself is the World Wide Web. WWW is an attempt to organize all the information on the Internet as a set of hypermedia documents. Besides that, the WWW allows users to access all kinds of Internet resources, just by using a browser to read the appropriate document. The Web provides a graphical user interface and enables the display of rich graphical images, pictures, full motion video, and sound clips.

  The Web is the most common way for businesses to establish a presence on the Internet. This Web has two major components, a Web browser and a Web server. A browser is a software package for accessing a Web server that stores files using HTML. There are many Web browsers available, including Mosaic, Netscape, Cello, and WinWeb. Most browsers show these links by highlighting text in a different color, usually blue. To use a link to go to a new page, users simply click on the text, and the browser takes users to the new page.

  A Web server stores information in a series of text files called pages. These text files or pages use a structured language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to store their information. HTML enables the author of a page to define different typestyles and sizes for the text, titles, and headings, and a variety of other formatting information. HTML also allows the author to define links to other pages that may be stored on the same Web server, or on any Web server anywhere on the Internet.

• WAIS: The WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Service. The original idea behind WAIS was to develop a generalized system of information retrieval that could access collections of data all around the world.