I agree with you here. I think the index is more important than anything
else. In my two previous messages I talk about how the index of
GopherSpace is maintained (I'm sure people are already familiar with this).
That index of registered servers has nothing at all to do with the
location of links within servers to other servers and other items in servers.
The index is something nice that is outside the realm of how individuals
can organize their servers. People can refer to the hierarchy of Gopher
servers when they are looking for a server or when whant to make a link.
On the UofMn's list of Gopher servers we choose to organize the servers
based on a geographical hierarchy, so if I have no clue what the URL to
NYU's Gopher server is I can take a peek at the NY state branch in the
hierarchy and find it.
The same can be said of VRML. It would be very useful if we come up
with some sort of hierarchy of VR sites. It would be nice if we do this
early on so that 2 years from now I can find an underwater world when
I need one.
If VRML sites are indexed using geography you also have (as a neat aside)
a way of quickly putting together "cities" because you can just say,
"okay, display all VRML pages in NYC as 1 big city" and it takes no real
work to pull something like this together, because you already have
an index - BUT, it is the index that is usefull to have, not a site with
30trilliongabillion polygons that noone can render let alone cruise
through:-)
And of course, since this is a VR world we can have geographical locations
such as outer space and underwater, etc etc. Also, more than just VRML
sites should be indexed, all VR worlds that can be gotten to via a URL
can be indexed.
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Neophytos Iacovou Distributed Computing Services
University of Minnesota 100 Union St. SE
email: [email protected] Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA