Design Goals

The goals of RCDS include:

• It must be easy to deploy in the current Internet.
• It must be highly reliable and fault-tolerant.
• It must use the network efficiently.
• It must provide adequate security, both to ensure that its authentication/integrity assurance services are trustworthy, and to thwart denial-of-service attacks.
• It must be flexible and general so that it can incorporate existing network protocols as well as evolve to meet future needs.
• It must be scalable to several orders of magnitude beyond the current resource base size without fundamental changes in the structure of resource names, or in the means by which a resource name is resolved to the network location of a server that provides the resource.

These goals have certain implications for our design:

• The flexibility goal dictates that the system should not assume present-day notions of roles such as ``author'', ``publisher'', or ``editor'' in determining who can supply information about a resource. It also compels us to accommodate multiple data models for use by catalog records, as well as a variety of cryptographic authentication and integrity checking algorithms. Likewise, the service should accomodate several different protocols for accessing and retrieving resources, including those that will be defined in the future as well as those in use today.
• The scalability, reliability, and network efficiency goals dictate that the system maintain replicated copies of the information which it provides and keep those copies in reasonable synchronization.
• The goal of ease of deployment implies that the service should augment, rather than replace, the current World Wide Web infrastructure. Furthermore, it should be easy for authors or publishers to set up and maintain their RCDS servers for the resources that they own.