- Since
its creation in 1992, the ANSI Z39.50 protocol (ISO 10163-1 standard) has been
specified in ASN.1 and encoded in BER. A variant of this protocol was used in
the WAIS service (Wide Area Information Server) to make all kinds of information
accessible on the Internet (library catalogs, directories, FTP archives,
newsgroups, images, source code, multimedia documents, etc.). It provides
facilities for keyword search, for extending a search by including new criteria
to be applied to the documents already found, and for downloading selected
documents. The Z39.50 protocol is mainly used in libraries and information
centers.
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