Reliable information service for Internet computer conferencing

The Conferencing Information Service {CIS} described in this paper is developed to provide reliable information to users about ongoing computer conferences throughout the Internet. CIS is composed of three major components: The Information Daemon {ID ), to store and retrieve information about the ongoing conferences in the Internet; The Conference Announcer {CA}, to broadcast conference information to the IDs; The User Interface {UI}, to retrieve the current conference information from the IDs, to display the retrieved information to the user in an X-window based interface, and to allow the users to start a new conference or join a selected ongoing conference.