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

PVW: Designing Virtual World Server Infrastructure

This paper presents a high level overview of PVW (Partitioned Virtual Worlds), a distributed system architecture for the management of virtual worlds. PVW is designed to support arbitrarily large and complex virtual worlds while accommodating dynamic and highly variable user population and content distribution density. The PVW approach enables the task of simulating and managing the virtual world to be distributed over many servers by spatially partitioning the environment into a hierarchical structure. This structure is useful both for balancing the simulation load across many nodes, as well as features such as geometric simplification and distribution of dynamic content

XPU: A Distributed Architecture for Metaverses

A significant problem of designing 3D virtual worlds (such as metaverses) is developing a scalable architecture that can manage millions of simultaneous users in an interactive 3D environment. This paper presents XPU (Extremely Partitioned Universe), a hierarchical client-server architecture for developing highly scalable metaverses. This design addresses the problem of dynamically partitioning the world to manage network and computing resources

Digital Libraries, Conceptual Knowledge Systems, and the Nebula Interface

Concept Analysis [12] provides a principled approach to effective management of wide area information systems, such as the Nebula File System and Interface [1]. This not only offers evidence to support the assertion [8] that a digital library is a bounded collection of incommensurate information sources in a logical space, but also sheds light on techniques for collaboration through coordinated access to the shared organization of knowledge [3]. The Gulf Tower 707 Grant Street Pittsburgh, PA 15219 1 This research was funded by a grant from Intel Corporation. 2 This research was funded by the Advanced Research Project Agency, under contract number F1962893 -C-1076. Introduction In their lead-off paper for last year's Digital Library' 94 conference [8], Francis Miksa and Philip Doty ask the question "Why should a digital library be called a `library' ?" They examine three aspects of the traditional library which may reveal the meaning of a digital library. These three aspects were ..

The Harvest Broker

This paper describes the Harvest Broker. The Broker plays a central role in the Harvest Query Manager Broker Storage Manager and Indexer Collector Client Object Cache Replication Manager Provider Gatherer 1. search object & retrieve 2. methods access SOIF SOIF Registry Broker Figure 1.1: The Harvest Architecture. architecture. It maintains a dynamic SOIF object database and presents this data to users through a powerful and effective query interface. For the purpose of characterizing access patterns, the Broker is instrumented to collect statistics through a selective logging facility. The Broker also supports real-time administrative control so that administrators can dynamically configure Broker parameters to best fit the environment. 1.1 Component