This paper presents some modifications and extensions to the current SOUR prototype (running on WINDOWS [19]) in order to make it a useful tool for the classification, storing and retrieval of Internet information.
The key aspects of the SOUR information model reflects the way in which documents are regarded today, no longer just mere files, but rather as books of pointers to objects of several kinds [13]. On the one hand, it can provide some important mechanisms in order to organize and, consequently, make the Internet navigation simpler. On the other hand, as the access to the information becomes easier and powerful, it can act like a personal tool for getting the information directly from the Web and, at the same time, to store and arrange it in the personal workstation into a more human-based organization model.
Among the topics discussed in the paper, probably the most complex is designing a general classification framework for arbitrary documents. However, the approach adopted by SOUR concerning software reuse in particular [11][12], as well as recent studies on fuzzy object-comparison [10] offer good perspectives for the future.
Future work includes the prospect of ``globalizing'' the adopted classification strategy. This means to scale up the approach from personal to world-wide classifiers. Some similarity between AOs and UNIVERSAL RESOURCE CITATIONS (URCs) [22] suggests that the SOUR AO profile-based paradigm can be scaled-up to a world-wide, Internet resource-based ``yellow-page''-like service of bibliographic metadata about WWW documents. Naturally, URCs would have to be extended with fuzzy attributes. But performance feasibility will have to be studied beforehand.