An overview of UNP

A brief introduction to the Universal Naming Protocol (UNP) is presented. UNP specifies a generic attribute-based name server upon which a variety of high-level naming services, including white- and yellow-page services, can be built

A Taxonomy of Self-configuring Service Discovery Systems

We analyze the fundamental concepts and issues in service discovery. This analysis places service discovery in the context of distributed systems by describing service discovery as a third generation naming system. We also describe the essential architectures and the functionalities in service discovery. We then proceed to show how service discovery fits into a system, by characterizing operational aspects. Subsequently, we describe how existing state of the art performs service discovery, in relation to the operational aspects and functionalities, and identify areas for improvement

Univers: The construction of an internet-wide descriptive naming system

Descriptive naming systems allow clients to identify a set of objects by description. Described here is the construction of a descriptive naming system, called Univers, based on a model in which clients provide both an object description and some meta-information. The meta-information describes beliefs about the query and the naming system. Specifically, it is an ordering on a set of perfect world approximations, and it describes the preferred methods for accommodating imperfect information. The description is then resolved in a way that respects the preferred approximations

Effective information sharing using update logs

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-88).by James William O'Toole, Jr.Ph.D

Content routing : a scalable architecture for network-based information discovery

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 134-141).by Mark A. Sheldon.Ph.D

Constructing highly-available distributed metainformation systems

PhD ThesisThis thesis demonstrates the adequacy of an object-oriented approach to the construction of distributed metainformation systems: systems that facilitate information use by maintaining some information about the information. Computer systems are increasingly being used to store information objects and make them accessible via network. This access, however, still relies on an adequate metainformation system: there must be an effective means of specifying relevant information objects. Moreover, distribution requires the metainformation system to cope well with intermittent availability of network resources. Typical metainformation systems developed to date permit information objects to be specified by expressing knowledge about their syntactic properties, such as keywords. Within this approach, however, query results are potentially too large to be transmitted, stored and treated, at reasonable cost and time. Users are therefore finding it difficult to navigate their way through the masses of information available. In contrast, this thesis is based on the principle that a metainformation system IS more effective if it permits information objects to be specified according to their semantic properties, and that this helps managing, filtering and navigating information. Of particular interest is object orientation because it is the stateof- the-art approach to both the representation of information semantics and the Abstract 11 design of reliable systems. The thesis presents the design and implementation of a programming toolkit for the construction of metainformation systems, where information objects can be any entity that contains information, the notion of views permits organising the information space, transactional access is employed to obtain consistency, and replication is employed to obtain high availability and scalability.Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento (CNPq, Brazil), grant number 201905/91.4