Volume 3. No 3 Information Technology News of the University of California, Davis Spring 1995

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Project Is Testbed for Global White Pages

Today the campus, tomorrow, the world. That's the outlook for the Whois++ project underway at UCD under the direction of I.T.'s Ken Weiss. Whois, of course, is the online white pages directory that allows us to find the e-mail address of any UC Davis account holder through gopher with the stroke of a key. Similar Whois directories in place at other campuses can be accessed through the World Wide Web.

The Whois++ project will expand the Whois search capability to the entire University of California system, enabling a user to track down an e-mail account holder at any of the university campuses simply by typing in Whois++ and a last name. In other words, when Whois++ is in place in six or eight months, it will no longer be necessary to know the name of the campus in order to locate e-mail account holders anywhere in the UC system But that's only the beginning. If the project is successful and satisfies Internet "rough consensus " standards of efficacy, the protocol is likely to be ballooned to global scale -- making it possible to find e-mail account holders anywhere in the world without the need for knowing the name of the appropriate server. Instead, Whois++ will go to what Weiss calls "a world centroid " to locate e-mail addresses.

Weiss, who is the UC Project Manager for the National Science Foundation-funded Whois++ testbed project, believes the prospects for global application are good.

"I think it will work, " he says, "and in the electronic world, rough consensus can happen fairly rapidly, like (it did) with the World Wide Web -- in just a few months. " The white pages project was chosen for funding, says Weiss, "because it's a small enough data problem that you don't have to argue about what to include or not include, but it's also applicable to other kinds of information."