This memo is an official status report on the protocols used in the Internet community. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

The Intemet protocol suite, TCP/IP, was first proposed fifteen years ago, It was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and has been used widely in military and commercial systems. While there have been papers and specifications that describe how the protocols work, it is sometimes difficult to deduce from these why the protocol is as it is. For example, the Intemet protocol is based on a connectionless ordatagram mode of service. The motivation for this has been greatly misunderstood. This paper attempts to capture some of the early reasoning which shaped the Intemet protocols.

A fundamental problem that confronts peer-to-peer applications is to efficiently locate the node that stores a particular data item. This paper presents Chord, a distributed lookup protocol that addresses this problem. Chord provides support for just one operation: given a key, it maps the key onto

the requirements for Internet host software. This RFC covers the communications protocol layers: link layer, IP layer, and transport layer; its companion RFC-1123 covers the application and support protocols.

The Internet has been a startling and dramatic success. However, multimedia applications, with their novel traffic characteristics and service requirements, pose an interesting challenge to the technical foundations of the Internet. In this paper we address some of the fundamental architectural

In this paper, we propose to use coordinates-based mechanisms in a peer-to-peer architecture to predict Internet network distance (i.e. round-trip propagation and transmission delay) . We study two mechanisms. The first is a previously proposed scheme, called the triangulated heuristic, which

, ” the likelihood that a route remains unchanged over a long period of time. We find that Internet paths are heavily dominated by a single prevalent route, but that the time periods over which routes persist show wide variation, ranging from seconds up to days. About 2/3's of the Internet paths had routes

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools, and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations, and/or software systems. We show how the development and implementation of an explicit account of a shared understanding (i.e. an `ontology') in a given subject area, can improve such communication, which in turn, can give rise to greater reuse and sharing, inter-operability, and more reliable software. After motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purposes they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, first discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing de nitions. We then consider the bene ts of and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the specification, implementation and evaluation of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging field,

Workflow management promises a new solution to an age-old problem: controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. This paper discusses

We present a new and more symmetric version of the circumscription method of nonmonotonic reasoning first described in (McCarthy 1980) and some applications to formalizing common sense knowledge. The applications in this paper are mostly based on minimizing the abnormality of different aspects