I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-uri-urn-handles-00.txt

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
directories. This draft is a work item of the Uniform Resource Identifiers 
Working Group of the IETF.                                                 

       Title     : The Handle System                                       
       Author(s) : W. Arms, D. Ely
       Filename  : draft-ietf-uri-urn-handles-00.txt
       Pages     : 16
       Date      : 06/26/1995

The Handle System provides identifiers for digital objects and other 
resources in distributed computer systems.  These identifiers are known as 
handles.  The system ensures that handles are unique and that they can be 
retained over long time periods.   Since the system makes no assumptions 
about the characteristics of the items that are identified, handles can be 
used in a wide variety of systems and applications.      

The handle system has the following components:  naming authorities, 
handle generators, the global handle server, local handle servers, 
caching handle servers, client software libraries, proxy servers, and 
administrative tools.  For reasons of performance and availability, 
the global, local, and caching servers are implemented as distributed 
systems comprising many server computers.  All components, except 
the local handle server, have been implemented and are available for 
general use by the research community.     

The handle system provides all the capabilities listed in RFC1737, 
K. Sollins, L. Masinter, "Functional Requirements for Uniform 
Resource Names", 12/20/1994.          

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