Applying an information gathering architecture to Netfind: a white pages tool for a changing and growing Internet

The Internet is quickly becoming an indispensable means of communication and collaboration, based on applications such as electronic mail, remote information retrieval, and multimedia conferencing. A fundamental problem for such applications is supporting resource discovery in a fashion that keeps pace with the Internet's exponential growth in size and diversity. Netfind is a scalable tool that locates current electronic mail addresses and other information about Internet users. Since the time we first deployed Netfind in 1990, it has evolved considerably, making use of more types of information sources. As well as more sophisticated mechanisms to gather and cross-correlate information. In this paper, we describe these techniques, and present a general framework for gathering and harnessing widely distributed information in a diverse and growing Internet environment. At present, Netfind gathers information from 17 different types of sources, providing a particularly thorough demonstration of an information gathering architecture.<
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