Handle System

The Handle System is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives's proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources".

As with handles used elsewhere in computing, Handle System handles are opaque, and encode no information about the underlying resource, being bound only to metadata regarding the resource. Consequently, the handles are not rendered invalid by changes to the metadata.

The system was developed by Bob Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). The original work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) between 1992 and 1996, as part of a wider framework for distributed digital object services, and was thus contemporaneous with the early deployment of the World Wide Web, with similar goals.

The Handle System was first implemented in autumn 1994, and was administered and operated by CNRI until December 2015, when a new "multi-primary administrator" (MPA) mode of operation was introduced. The DONA Foundation now administers the system's Global Handle Registry and accredits MPAs, including CNRI and the International DOI Foundation. The system currently provides the underlying infrastructure for such handle-based systems as Digital Object Identifiers and DSpace, which are mainly used to provide access to scholarly, professional and government documents and other information resources.

CNRI provides specifications and the source code for reference implementations for the servers and protocols used in the system under a royalty-free "Public License", similar to an open source license.

Thousands of handle services are currently running. Over 1000 of these are at universities and libraries, but they are also in operation at national laboratories, research groups, government agencies, and commercial enterprises, receiving over 200 million resolution requests per month.

Specifications

The Handle System is defined in informational RFCs 3650, 3651 and 3652 of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); it includes an open set of protocols, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocols. Documentation, software, and related information is provided by CNRI on a dedicated website

Licences and use policy

Handle System, HANDLE.NET and Global Handle Registry are trademarks of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a non-profit research and development corporation in the USA. The Handle System is the subject of patents by CNRI, which licenses its Handle System technology through a public license, similar to an open source license, in order to enable broader use of the technology. Handle System infrastructure is supported by prefix registration and service fees, with the majority coming from single prefix holders. The largest current single contributor is the International DOI Foundation. The Public License allows commercial and non-commercial use at low cost of both its patented technology and the reference implementation of the software, and allows the software to be freely embedded in other systems and products. A Service Agreement is also available for users who intend to provide identifier and/or resolution services using the Handle System technology under the Handle System public license.

References

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