Engineering a Global Resolution Service
Edward C. Slottow · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1997
As the World Wide Web continues to balloon in size the issue of a robust information infrastructure has become increasingly important. Currently, Web links are based on fragile names that have limited life due to semantic content. Uniform Resource Names (URNs), globally unique, persistent identifiers, are one way to solve this problem. Resolvers map URNs to the resources they identify. We describe a global Resolver Discovery Service (RDS) that determines the appropriate resolver for a URN devoid of location information. The RDS uses a high degree of distribution and replication to achieve scalability, both in the number of URNs and users. We have implemented a subset of the RDS as a proof-of-concept.