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Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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By Jason Levitt
This standard isn't just for people like me who find that the single clumsiest aspect of using the Web is typing in links by hand or trying to spell one out to someone over the telephone. It's also for any business that wants to attach a friendly front end to a directory-style database that it wants humans to access.
Although CNRP may sound like a search-engine technology (think Yahoo or AltaVista), it's not intended to compete with traditional search engines--instead it complements them. CNRP is used to access information that has a straightforward mapping, such as names to telephone numbers or book titles to ISBNs.
A Look Back
As I wrote in an InternetView column back in 1998 I didn't agree with Centraal's attempt to privatize the service because I don't think a single private company should own the root server (the master database of name-to-URL mappings). Still, RealNames has succeeded in building a usable infrastructure for general-purpose name-to-Internet resource discovery. Although the RealNames system sometimes amounts to nothing more than a glorified search engine (most queries of the RealNames systems bring back a list of possibilities much like any search engine), at its best, it provides the most common mapping of a simple word to a URL near the top of the list, thus preventing you from having to remember, or enter, the URL yourself.
New Competition
Meanwhile, one of the more valuable uses of CNRP continues to emerge. Internet appliances, including cell phones, personal digital assistants, and other non-traditional browsing devices, are obvious candidates for CNRP, because users don't want to be burdened with entering, or remembering, URL syntax on those devices.
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he idea of typing a simple word or phrase into your Web browser's address bar and then being taken to the Web site that best fits those words isn't a new idea; in fact, lots of search engines and directory services work that way. But only recently has a standard emerged for free-form directory lookups, and it's a standard that could potentially put a friendlier face on lots of applications. The Common Name Resolution Protocol, a newly proposed standard offered by the Internet Engineering Task Force provides a structure and protocol for mapping human-readable identifiers to Internet resources.
The idea of a mapping of human-readable identifiers to Internet resources has been around for a while--in fact, for as long as the Web itself has been around. The idea was originally batted around as the Internet grew up, between 1990 and 1994. Several requests for comments--in particular, RFC 1737, titled "Functional Requirements for Uniform Resource Names"--discussed an infrastructure for mapping simple names to Internet resources. Although some prototype mapping services such as Turnip were attempted, nothing ever reached fruition. All of that changed in 1998, when Centraal Corp. announced its intention to create a private version of the mapping, which they call RealNames, aimed at mapping common names to Internet resources, which usually are corporate Web sites. For example, the common name "Apple Computer" would take you to http://www.apple.com.
While CNRP won't change the fact that RealNames has a lead in building a database of mappings and partnerships (Microsoft's recent 20% equity stake in RealNames is a clue that RealNames has a database of some value), I'm really hoping that CNRP will help other players in this market space make competitive offerings. For one thing, the cost of RealNames is too high for small businesses ($100 a year, which includes only 10,000 "hits" to their RealNames keyword).
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