GILS is a decentralized collection of locators and associated information services used by the public either directly or through intermediaries to find information. GILS starts from a basic premise that the Global Information Infrastructure should enhance the free flow of information. The initiative primarily addresses the ways in which characteristics of information resources are exposed to searching, a fundamental aspect of information infrastructure that has policy as well as technology implications. With GILS, social, political, economic organizations of information exist independently, yet their diverse information locators are interoperable for searching. GILS adopts existing open standards that achieve this interoperability by allowing reference to common semantics for characterizing information resources by the ANSI Z39.50 standard. This standard specifies how electronic network searches can be expressed and how results are returned. Therefore, GILS is an innovative networked-based approach to assist user in locating information resources.
This thesis proposes architecture of GILS. First, we study fundamental implementation technologies by the way of GILS and Z39.50 Protocol. And then, by surveying GILS related technologies and cases such as U.S. Canada, Japan, and Korea.
In addition, we suggest GILS-based Information Access Infrastructure with different levels of strategy in public sector as well as commercial sector such as Electronic Commerce and Cooperate Information System. This study failed to implement GILS in commercial sector, but have an implication to raise further research issue.