RFC 2378 (rfc2378) - Page 1 of 22

The CCSO Nameserver (Ph) Architecture

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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
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