Common Indexing Protocol

From ArticleWorld

The Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) is an indexing protocol that defines methods for creating and exchanging index information among indexing servers. The CIP is an improvement over the WHOIS++ Internet protocol which was primarily meant for finding information about resources on networks. This protocol was developed during the mid-1990s in order to come up with a protocol for exchanging index information between directory services.

The indexes have subsets of information about both individuals as well as organizations represented in a white pages schema. Once the indexes are exchanged, a particular server looks into its own index to answer a query , or check among the indexes received from other servers to find out whether the query can be answered elsewhere.

The CIP works to distribute searches across many instances of a certain type of search engine in order to create a global directory. Individual databases can be tied into distributed data warehouse.

Development of Common Indexing Protocol

The concept of this protocol is based on the work done by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) FIND working group which focussed on the CIP. It is based on two fundamental concepts, in the first place, that it would be possible to come up with a system with the help of which any type of indexing information could be sent between index producers and servers. The second priciple is that of query routing.

One of the underlying assumptions that were made during the development of the Common Indexing Protocol was that the interactions between the clients and the Index Mesh Servers would depend heavily on referrals. The index servers and their contained indexes are represented in a defined directory information tree (DIT) structure.