The goals of the Project were to address several key problems that
hampered the open sharing of information. The problems included:
- Data and platform incompatibilities.
- Inconsistent interfaces.
- Search and navigation difficulties across machine borders.
- Islands of data, inaccessible to those who could benefit from it.
In order to address these problems, the resulting system had to
provide the following key features:
- A standard protocol for requesting information stored on any
connected system, local or remote.
- A standard protocol for the exchange of information in a format
common to both the server and the client.
- Provide both a keyword search option and hypertext navigation.
- Allow private individuals to link their documents to those in other
collections.
- And in the true spirit of the Internet, to provide the resulting
software free of charge to anyone.
The resulting system more than met those goals...