The Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) was an attempt in the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

working group FIND during the mid-1990s to define a protocol for exchanging index information between directory services. In the

X.500 X.500 is a series of computer networking standards covering electronic directory services. The X.500 series was developed by the ITU-T, Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T). ITU-T was former ...

Directory model, searches scoped near the root of the tree (e.g. at a particular country) were problematic to implement, as potentially hundreds or thousands of directory servers would need to be contacted in order to handle that query. The indexes contained summaries or subsets of information about individuals and organizations represented in a

white pages schema A white pages schema is a data model, specifically a logical schema, for organizing the data contained in entries in a directory service, database, or application, such as an address book. In a white pages directory, each entry typically represent ...

. By merging subsets of information from multiple sources, it was hoped that an index server holding that subset could be able to process a query more efficiently by chaining it only to some of the sources: those sources which did not hold information would not be contacted. For example, if a server holding the base entry for a particular country were provided with a list of names of all the people in all the entries in that country subtree, then that server would be able to process a query searching for a person with a particular name by only chaining it to those servers which held data about such a person. The protocol evolved from earlier work developing WHOIS++, and was intended to be capable of interconnecting services from both the evolving WHOIS and LDAP activities. This protocol has not seen much recent deployment, as WHOIS and LDAP environments have followed separate evolution paths. WHOIS deployments are typically in domain name registrars, and its data management issues have been addressed through specifications for domain name registry interconnection such as

CRISP CRISP may refer to: * Center for Research in Security and Privacy, largest research center for IT security in Europe * C-language Reduced Instruction Set Processor, an AT&T microprocessor design * Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Pat ...

. In contrast, enterprises that manage employee, customer or student identity data in an LDAP directory have looked to federation protocols for interconnection between organizations.

RFCs

* The Architecture of the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) * MIME Object Definitions for the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) * CIP Transport Protocols * A Tagged Index Object for use in the Common Indexing Protocol * CIP Index Object Format for SOIF Objects * Registration Procedures for SOIF Template Types * {{IETF RFC, 2657, link=no LDAPv2 Client vs the Index Mesh

RFCs

See also