kasykvision - The vision behind Kasyk
This document describes my vision about Kasyk. It hopefully answers any questions you may have with regards to what I'm trying to achieve with Kasyk.
People are gathering more and more data. Information technology is becoming more and more commonplace in large and small companies and the home. Even within the home, more and more computers are being used. But there is no easy way to search through the data on a single computer, let alone on all of the computers at a specific location. Even if they are networked.
Kasyk is the search engine software that will be able to fill this niche. It has all the elements for creating local search engine services for local users. And if you want, you can make (some of) those local search engine services accessible by the outside world. And if that is the case, become a part of a network of search engine services.
Most search engine software of today is monolithic in nature. The information that can be searched, needs to be in one central location (even though that may mean it is spread out over multiple hosts, it acts as a single entity.
This is strange considering that many aspects of the Internet are distributed in nature. A prime example of this is how DNS works: the process of converting names of hosts into IP-numbers.
Several attempts have been made so far to create a distributed search engine service for the Internet: these search engine services combine the result of other (monolithic) search engines into a result list. There are however three problems with this approach:
The depth of knowledge of a monolithic search engine service can by definition only be limited. It will never be possible to capture all of the information in the whole universe into a single search engine. Many academic institutions are already complaining that their output is not findable on the Internet.
This is mainly caused by the fact that monolithic search engine services only "scratch" the top of each web site that gets indexed, simply because there are not enough resources to copy it all and/or have everything up-to-date. A monolithic search engine service seldom searches deeper than the third level of links inside a web site. Large web sites often have more than 10 levels of links.
The Kasyk search engine software contains (almost) all of the elements with which a network of distributed search engine services can be created.
In the past years the Internet has become more commonplace, more like the "real" world. While the Internet consisted of a community of like-minded individuals who all knew what the "mores" of the Internet were, there were hardly any problems of dependency or inequality in any form whatsoever.
Since then, the Internet has become much more like the "real" world. You are expect to pay, in some form or another, for services rendered. This in itself is not bad, as it will allow for a sustainable growth of the Internet. If everybody gets the same chances. Unfortunately a lot of these services are becoming more and more a monopoly. Potentially threatening the democratic nature of the Internet. And it's becoming increasingly more difficult to start something new, especially in view of the financial resources of competitors.
Even more worrying of these monopolic services, is the danger of "censorship" in the broadest sense of the word. An example: suppose you are searching for information on generic "compound X". The only remaining search engine service in the world only lists "product Y" of company "Z" as the only producer of "compound X". However, in the world there are many more producers of this compound, but they are not listed for whatever reason (be it either financial, or just as an oversight). So you might think there is only one producer for that compound in the world.
In other words, we're getting close to the situation of "if we can't find it, it doesn't exist" syndrome. Which becomes even more troubling if you consider that most monolithic search engine services are located in the same geographical, financial and, maybe even more importantly, political sphere of influence.
But fortunately, we (almost) have the technology to prevent this prediction from becoming the truth. All we need is a little more development and some good cooperation.
So we're now in the situation in which fewer and fewer search engine services are gathering more and more human knowledge, but still gathering a relatively smaller part of human knowledge altogether because of their monolithic nature.
Especially in academic environments, search engines have become important. Many academic institutions offer a search engine service for "their" content. But they are not part of the large, monolithic search engine services of the Internet. And consequently, become more and more "non-existent" to the public that is using the general search engine services of the Internet. But this also impairs the academic who cannot rely on the general search engine service anymore (as there is no equivalent for the "academic" content of the Internet). And this is but an example.
So, if "local" search engine services could be linked together into networks of search engine services, this would achieve a functional search engine service that would truly go where the general, monolithic search engine services of the world would not go.
Dijkmat is committed to developing Kasyk into the first generation of search engine software that will allow truly distributed search operations. And to help organize the development of distributed search engine services around the world.
April 2003, Elizabeth Mattijsen, Dijkmat BV, Bosstraat 21, 6101 NV Echt, The Netherlands
Kasyk home, future of Kasyk, licensing policy of Kasyk, Kasyk introduction, Kasyk flow of information, Kasyk history.
See http://www.kasyk.nl/vision.html for the most up-to-date version of this information.
Copyright © 2003 Dijkmat BV
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Kasyk Information: Kasyk version 1.0.0, generated on Tue Nov 25 12:09:47 2003.