Investigating Link Service Infrastructures

Variations on the Distributed Link Service have now been deployed across a spectrum of hypermedia and multimedia projects. Although some implementations have utilised standard database technologies and hypermedia tools behind the scenes, most of the network services have been proprietary implementations. In this paper we discuss the motivation and requirements for a large scale, dynamic and open distributed link service using third party components, and explore the use of off-the-shelf services to provide the distributed infrastructure for link services. In particular we investigate HTTP, LDAP and Whois++ as candidate technologies.