RFC 2258 (rfc2258) - Page 2 of 15
Internet Nomenclator Project
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2258 Internet Nomenclator Project January 1998 1. Introduction Hundreds of organizations provide directory information through the CCSO name service protocol [3]. Although the organizations provide a wealth of information about people, finding any one person can be difficult because each organization's server is independent. The different servers have different database schemas (attribute names and data formats). The 300+ CCSO servers have more than 900 different attributes to describe information about people. Very few common attributes exist. Only name and email occur in more than 90% of the servers [4]. No special support exists for cross-server searches, so searching can be slow and expensive. The goal of the Internet Nomenclator Project is to provide fast, integrated access to the information in the CCSO servers. The project is the first large-scale use of the Nomenclator system. Nomenclator is a more general system than a white pages directory service. It is a scalable, extensible information system for the Internet. Nomenclator answers descriptive (i.e. relational) queries. Users can locate information about people, organizations, hosts, services, publications, and other objects by describing their attributes. Nomenclator achieves fast descriptive query processing through an active catalog, and extensive meta-data and data caching. The active catalog constrains the search space for a query by returning a list of data repositories where the answer to the query is likely to be found. Meta-data and data caching keep frequently used query processing resources close to the user, thus reducing communication and processing costs. Through the Internet Nomenclator Project, users can query any CCSO server, regardless of its attribute names or data formats, by specifying the query to Nomenclator (see Figure 1). Nomenclator provides a world view of the data in the different servers. Users express their queries in this world view. Nomenclator returns the answer immediately if it has been cached by a previous query. If not, Nomenclator uses its active catalog to constrain the query to the subset of relevant CCSO servers. The speed of the query is increased, because only relevant servers are contacted. Nomenclator translates the global query into local queries for each relevant CCSO server. It then translates the responses into the format of the world view. Ordille Informational
