The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web's meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures---the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the illfated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).

A number of researchers have become interested in the design of global-scale networked systems and applications. Our thesis here is that the database community's principles and technologies have an important role to play in the design of these systems. The point of departure is at the roots of database research: we generalize Codd's notion of data independence to physical environments beyond storage systems.

A variety of proposals call for a new Internet architecture focused on retrieving content by name, but it has not been clear that any of these approaches are general enough to support Internet applications like real-time streaming or email. We present a detailed description of a prototype implementation of one such application – Voice over IP (VoIP) – in a content-based paradigm. This serves as a good example to show how content-based networking can offer advantages for the full range of Internet applications, if the architecture has certain key properties.

The Internet’s architecture, designed in the days of large, stationary computers tended by technically savvy and accountable administrators, fails to meet the demands of the emerging ubiquitous computing era. Nontechnical users now routinely own multiple personal devices, many of them mobile, and need to share information securely among them using interactive, delay-sensitive applications. Unmanaged Internet Architecture (UIA) is a novel, incrementally deployable network architecture for modern personal devices, which reconsiders three architectural cornerstones: naming, routing, and transport. UIA augments the Internet’s global name system with a personal name system, enabling users to build personal administrative groups easily and intuitively, to establish secure bindings between his devices and with other users’ devices, and to name his devices and his friends

We present Storm, a storage system which unifies the desktop and the public network, making Web links between desktop documents more practical. Storm assigns each document a permanent unique URI when it is created. Using peer-to-peer technology, we can locate documents even though our URIs do not include location information. Links continue to work unchanged when documents are emailed or published on the network. We have extended KDE to understand Storm URIs. Other systems such as GNU Emacs are able to use Storm through an HTTP gateway.

The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web’s meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures—the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the illfated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs). 1

This article is an editorial note submitted to CCR. It has NOT been peer reviewed. The authors take full responsibility for this article’s technical content. Comments can be posted through CCR Online. We argue that the biggest problem with the current Internet architecture is not a particular functional deficiency, but its inability to accommodate innovation. To address this problem we propose a minimal architectural “framework ” in which comprehensive architectures can reside. The proposed Framework for Internet Innovation (FII) — which is derived from the simple observation that network interfaces should be extensible and abstract — allows for a diversity of architectures to coexist, communicate, and evolve. We demonstrate FII’s ability to accommodate diversity and evolution with a detailed examination of how information flows through the architecture and with a skeleton implementation of the relevant interfaces.