Mark A. Sheldon, Andrzej Duda, Ron Weiss, James W. O'Toole, Jr., and David K. Gifford
Proc. Fourth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, Cambridge, England, March 1994
Available as Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Number 779

We describe a system that provides query based associative access to the contents of distributed information servers. In typical distributed information systems there are so many objects that underconstrained queries can produce large result sets and extraordinary processing costs. To deal with this scaling problem we use content labels to permit users to learn about available resources and to formulate queries with adequate discriminatory power. We have implemented associative access to a distributed set of information servers in the content routing system. A content routing system is a hierarchy of servers called content routers that present a single query based image of a distributed information system. We have successfully used a prototype content routing system to locate documents on several user file systems and on a large number of information servers.

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