Reliable information service for Internet computer conferencing

The Conferencing Information Service (CIS) described 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