Draft: Universal Document Identifiers

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl)
Thu, 27 Feb 92 17:22:44 GMT+0100

An information universe on the [Inter]net requires a cannonical form
for the name or address of a document. Building on much previous
network discussion, a draft discussion paper

Universal Document Identifiers on the Network

is now availableby anonymous FTp from node info.cern.ch as
/pub/www/doc/udi1.ps (or if desperate .txt)

or, to use its UDI, file://info.cern.ch/pub/www/doc/udi1.ps.
This describes an addressing scheme encompassing many objects on the
network including archived files, news articles and groups, gopher
things, wais indexes, queries, and documents.

Comments are solicited.

A shorter paper on the requirements a universal hypertext system
such as WWW imposes on WAIS and x.500 protocols is
file://info.cern.ch/pub/www/doc/wais_x500_www.ps (or .txt)
is intended as input to the IETF wais/x500 BOF in March
(which I might be able to go to)

Tim

__________________________________________________________
Tim Berners-Lee timbl@info.cern.ch
World Wide Web initiative (NeXTMail is ok)
CERN Tel: +41(22)767 3755
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland Fax: +41(22)767 7155