Handle System
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section appears to contain a large number of buzzwords and may require cleanup. Please help rewrite this article to make it more concrete and meaningful, removing tautologies, obvious statements and excessive abstraction. (talk) |
[edit] The Handle System
The Handle System [1] is a general purpose distributed information system that provides efficient, extensible, and secure identifier and resolution services for use on networks such as the Internet. It includes an open set of protocols, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocols. The protocols enable a distributed computer system to store identifiers, known as handles, of arbitrary resources and resolve those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, contact, authenticate, or otherwise make use of the resources. This information can be changed as needed to reflect the current state of the identified resource without changing its identifier, thus allowing the name of the item to persist over changes of location and other related state information. The original version of the Handle System technology was developed with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The Handle System is an infrastructure on which applications serving many different purposes are being built. Some examples are rights management applications, persistent identifiers for digital objects on the Web, and institutional data preservation and archiving. See "Current Applications of the Handle System" [2] for descriptions of some of these projects.
The Handle System interface specification is described in three RFCs:
Sam Sun, Larry Lannom, Brian Boesch, "Handle System Overview". Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC), RFC 3650, November 2003.
Sam Sun, Sean Reilly, Larry Lannom, "Handle System Namespace and Service Definition". Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC), RFC 3651, November 2003.
Sam Sun, Sean Reilly, Larry Lannom, Jason Petrone, "Handle System Protocol (ver 2.1) Specification". Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC), RFC 3652, November 2003.
