A Framework for Broadcasting and Management of URIs

Miguel Rio, António Costa, Joaquim Macedo, Vasco Freitas

Universidade do Minho
Departamento de Informáatica
4700-320 Braga, Portugal

Abstract

Several Internet information services paradigms are based upon information resource links. In order to achieve inter-operability and integration of different services, the Internet community is dedicating some effort to the standardization of uniform resource identifiers (URI).

At present, the most popular URI is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The physical nature of a URL, due to its dependance on location, leads to the need for more logical (rational) resource identifiers such as the Uniform Resource Name and the correspondent name-to-locator mapping function.

Todays increasing number of announced resources and expected reliability of name-to-locator mapping services, suggest the need for well established software tools and standard protocols to handle and exchange URIs among information servers.

In this paper, a framework for the management of uniform resource identifiers is discussed. Attention is paid to the issues of broadcasting and registration of original and replicated information resources. The Usenet News and the E-mail distribution lists are considered the supporting mechanisms.

The main goals of this work are:

To devise the most convenient ways of publishing resource identifiers;
To achieve coordination between the announcement mechanism and an efficient method of urn2urc mapping and
To engineer a system to provide a scalable management of document copies on the Internet.

We begin with a background presentation on URI technology: reference and document replication services and facilities. This is followed by a proposal of an architecture, an operational model and its components. An implementation of some prototype components is then presented and discussed.