newsgroup Organisation

The newsgroups are organised in a hierarchical tree, each level separated by a dot. The top level is called a category.

The [original] USENET News consisted of 7 categories/groups (based on [5, p. 154]). Table 1.6 displays those categories.

Table 1.6: USENET News Categories.

Category	Description
comp	computer science related.
news	network news related.
rec	hobbies; recreational activities; arts.
sci	scientific research and applications.
soc	social issues; politics.
talk	forum for debate on controversial topics.
misc	other topics.

But since any newsgroup may be created locally and be distributed to all other news servers, a number of other categories are now accessible from most sites.

The most important other categories are (based on [5, p. 155-6]) shown in Table 1.7.

Table 1.7: Other important Network News Categories.

Category	Description
alt	alternate groups that don't quite fit anywhere.
bionet	for biologists.
bit	BITNET listserv discussion groups.
biz	for business; one of the only categories where advertisement
	and marketing are allowed.
de	different groups, in the German language.
fj	different groups, in Japanese.
hepnet	High Energy Physics.
ieee	related to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
info	mailing lists on wide variety of topics.
gnu	Free Software Foundation and GNU project.
k12	for teachers and students of kindergarten to grade 12.
relcom	groups originating in the former USSR.
u3b	AT&T 3B computer series.
vmsnet	Digital VAX/VMS and DECnet groups.

Any newsserver may chose which groups are allowed on the system. NRC has only a subset of the Network News groups on the main newsserver, news.nrc.ca, in addition to many other categories, some of which are seen in Table 1.8.

Table 1.8: More Local Network News Categories.

Category	Description
nrc	NRC related; eg: nrc.test, nrc.events.
uw	University of Waterloo; eg: uw.unix, uw.outers.
ut	University of Toronto; eg ut.chinese; ut.dcs.graphics.
ott	Ottawa related; eg: ott.general, ott.forsale.
tor	Toronto specific; eg: tor.news, tor.test.
ont	Ontario-wide; eg: ont.jobs, ont.uucp.
can	Canadian groups; eg: can.newprod, can.domain.