SpaceKit Viewer Our SpaceKit Rocket Science Feature provides an in-depth look at Danny Goodman's work, complete with annotated code, audio interviews and more.

      Finding things on the Internet is still way too hard, even for experienced searchers and people who spend lots of time online. To try to fix this, Danny Goodman and the folks at Invisible Worlds have developed a series of tools called the SpaceKit Viewer to make searching more satisfying. (The company is the parent organization who operates this magazine.)

      Why is searching so hard? Several reasons. Places to start your search aren't intuitive–you have to remember the names of these starting places and understand how they operate. And many times you either get too much or too little information from your queries–there is no easy way to narrow or widen your search without a great deal of understanding of the underlying results.

      Even if you find the right web site with lots of information, crafting your search query isn't always obvious or easy. How many keywords do you type in the search box–three or more words will generally be too specific and you might miss particular pages of interest. One word may not be enough to uniquely identify what you need. And if you are searching for something that is a relatively common term, such as all the John Smiths, you might be in for some tedious times reviewing your many pages of results.

      Often you search without knowing the perspective on the topic or understanding the relationship of the various bits and pieces of information that comprise your search results. Finally, once you complete a search you can't easily return to your result set.

      The trouble is you need a tool that does more than just bookmark a few starting points, and also does more than allow queries to be strung together with a series of qualifiers. Enter Danny Goodman's SpaceKit Viewer.

space.cgi In our second Rocket Science feature, Dr. Marshall T. Rose explains the web proxy interface to the SpaceServer, known as space.cgi.

      Goodman is one of the more exceptional JavaScript programmers around, and he worked closely with several staffers from Invisible Worlds to produce the series of tools involved in the SpaceKit Viewer. Elsewhere in this issue you can try the tool out yourself, sample scripts, a tour of the sample databases, and interviews with Goodman himself explaining what he did. Included as well is the actual code itself along with the documentation of the various components that comprise the tool.

      The demonstration was developed to work with two databases: the entire collection of several thousand Internet Request for Comments (RFCs) and the millions of documents that are part of the EDGAR Securities and Exchange Commission corporate filings. Users can search for particular keywords in these documents, as well as view relationships among all the documents. Let's say you wish to see all the RFCs written by a particular author, or those which involve a particular protocol. The SpaceKit Viewer will show you these and other relationships, as well as just providing the actual text of the documents themselves.

      One of the more important features is the ability to sort the result set in various ways. Sorting and other tools that are part of the Invisible Worlds protocols and standards give users control over their data and making their searches more effective by exposing the relationships among the data themselves, not just providing a list of results. Try doing this with your average search site–you usually can't. This is what David Clark, Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science means by saying, “when you wander around on the web, you would like to get above it and to look around.”

      The SpaceKit Viewer is just the beginning of a series of products and tools from Invisible Worlds. They aim to work closely with many developers to create ways to search other “spaces,” including corporate intranets and specialty databases as well as other repositories of public documents. And the company welcomes your feedback: please take a moment to voice your comments and concerns in the feedback discussion forums.