English Abstract Meta-information, information on -in this report
electronic- information, is useful in finding the right information within a
distributed environment like RIVM. Meta-information can be stored and
accessed in many ways. This report describes three public domain
-distributed- systems that facilitate storage and retrieval of information,
and also discusses their security consequences. Systems discussed are Wide
Area Information Systems (WAIS), Gopher and World Wide Web. All three are
Internet based applications providing several types of information from
multiple servers, without their users knowing about specific machines or
software they are accessing.
