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.