RFC 2378 (rfc2378) - Page 1 of 22
The CCSO Nameserver (Ph) Architecture
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group R. Hedberg
Request for Comments: 2378 Umea University
Category: Informational P. Pomes
QUALCOMM, Inc.
September 1998
The CCSO Nameserver (Ph) Architecture
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
The Ph Nameserver from the Computing and Communications Services
Office (CCSO), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has for
some time now been used by several organizations as their choice of
publicly available database for information about people as well as
other things. This document provides a formal definition of the
client-server protocol. The Ph service as specified in this document
is built around an information model, a client command language and
the server responses.
1. Overview
1.1. Basic Information Model
At its simplest the Ph database can be thought of as a computer-
resident "phone book". However, it can be used to collect arbitrary
information about people, and in response to a query about an object
named in the database, return information about that entity. It is
in short a nameserver for people and objects. It was designed to
keep a relatively small amount of arbitrary information about a
relatively large number of people or things, and provide access to
that information over the Internet. In order to structure the
information the manager of the database has to decide which views to
present of the real-world objects that are to be represented in the
database. Each view is then composed of a number of fields and their
values. To support this concept Ph has the notion of named
information, i.e., categorizing information into what are called
fields and assigning descriptive names to those fields.
Hedberg & Pomes Informational