Web searches of databases (really!)

[Woody Woods]

Following Ken Philip's suggestion, I have retyped the text for a couple
of lines before and after the truncation. I think I know it by heart
now! Again, it is a response from my thesis advisor, whose experience is
particularly applicable in this case, to a recent exchange between Ron
and Chris. Here it is (I hope, I hope, I hope...):

Recent postings by Ron Gatrelle and Chris Durden identify two problems
people face when using the internet.  Ron notes that he has had trouble
negotiating the TIARA Biodiversity web site
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/tiara/. The software world is moving towards a
solution to this problem. It is based on a technology called XML and you
can read about it at center for new technologies called W3C
http://www.w3.org/. This approach allows one to separate views of the
data from the underlying structure of the data. This means that it is
possible to customize a view of data for a particular user groups or
even individuals. If you can use IE5 than you can get a feel for want is
to coming by looking at
http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/xml1/ram/xmldemos.html. Try the 3 demos.

Major business interests are behind the switch from HTML to XML. This
transformation is well underway. You can read about the history by
looking at the W3C site.

Chris Durden also brings up an interesting issue about finding
information, namely that search engines are unable to find data inside
internet database sites because the engines do not know how to "crawl"
inside of databases or ask the right queries to "crawl inside of
databases.