Knowbot Information Service

networking, information science (KIS) Also known as

netaddress. The Knowbot Information Service (KIS) provides a

uniform user interface to a variety of remote directoryservices such as whois, finger, X.500, MCIMail. By

submitting a single query to KIS, a user can search a set of

remote white pages services and see the results of the

search in a uniform format.

There are several interfaces to the KIS service including

electronic mail and telnet. Another KIS interface

imitates the Berkeley whois command.

KIS consists of two distinct types of modules which interact

with each other (typically across a network) to provide the

service. One module is a user agent module that runs on the

KIS mail host machine. The second module is a remote server

module (possibly on a different machine) that interrogates

various database services across the network and provides the

results to the user agent module in a uniform fashion.

Interactions between the two modules can be via messages

between Knowbots or by actual movement of Knowbots.

There are electronic mail interfaces for KIS at the hosts

cnri.reston.va.us and sol.bucknell.edu. Send a message

containing just the word "man" to [email protected] or

[email protected]. Telnet: info.cnri.reston.va.us

port 185.