Globewide Network Academy's Meta-Index
The purpose of the GNA Meta-library is to create an easily accessible
database of information devoted to education on the Internet. The
meta-index is a tool for searching the GNA document collection and
other pages suggested by GNA users.
GNA is a worldwide non-profit consortium of educational and research
organizations whose mission is to improve education by creating a
marketplace for online courses. It also offers administrative and technical
services to organizations and individuals who are presenting such courses.
Key Links
URL for Front
Page: http://uu-gna.mit.edu:8001/uu-gna/index.htm
URLs for Top-Level Pages:
URLs for Non-Forms Search Pages:
URL for
Legal
Pages Index:
http://uu-gna.mit.edu:8001/uu-gna/documents/index.htm
URL for
FAQ Page:
http://uu-gna.mit.edu:8001/uu-gna/documents/catalog/catalog-p1.txt
URL for Help Page:
http://uu-gna.mit.edu:8001/uu-gna/miranda/search.tips.html
Home Organization:
Global
Network Academy (GNA), a consortion of educational and other
institutions.
Organization
- In general the collection has no strong organization, but rather various
areas are grouped under index pages. Key areas of interest are listed
above, or can be found from the GNA front page.
-
There seem to be 3 different pages dedicated to search the GNA
collection. There is no indication of what data these resources search
across, nor why one would be better than the other; rather most of
documentation is devoted to technical discussion of the database and
search mechanism. The search engines have the following attributes:
- The Meta-index search engine is based on a table built from a
substring search of the Meta-library, then sorted by frequency. The
shell
script searches this file by calling the simple
/rdb
database engine.
- The Miranda search engine is based on common UNIX software for
scanning text files, such as awk and sort, and
performed with a simple
shell
script.
- The Catalog search gives no indication as to its underlying engine,
but clearly states that it is a prototype. It is used to search
the document tree that describes the courses offered by GNA.
- The server allows multiple keywords, which are treated as if
linked by the Boolean AND. No other control is given over substring
searches, except to eliminate a few common conjunctions and letters.
- The server forces a limit of 100 or 200 documents to each search,
with no user control over this number.
- Search results display document name, topic, and the date it
was added to the database, with other miscellaneous (and often
empty data fields).
- None of these search pages require forms-support to use.
- The catalogs and all 3 search tools only span the contents of the GNA
Web site and user-suggested documents, which means that this server
has little value for searching the Internet in general.
Administration
- The document placed on this archive are automatically searchable by the
mechanism involved, but there is no effort to standardize the organization
of the catalog as a whole. In fact, locating a particular piece of
information proves to be rather difficult due to the poor layout of
the documentation.
- Each of the search engines currently return results within about 20 or
30 seconds, but there are serious questions regarding the scalability
of these tools. I feel that the search scripts used on this server are
of the simplest design and lowest quality, and will need to be replaced
as the traffic on this server increases.
- Pages are added at the rate of 3 to 5 a month (according to the new
documents logfile), and I could find no dead links to speak of. The
documents describe the collection as a "compendium of several
thousand Internet references."
- Additional Services
Evaluation
Example Usage
Demonstrate a sample search session explicitly listing:
- Topic
- Keyword(s), Boolean search controls
- Documents delivered
- Output format
fprefect@umich.edu - 6/12/95