Patent ID: 6135646
Filing Date: 2000-10-24
Classification: G06F,G06Q,Y10S

Abstract:
A system for organizing digital information in a network that includes computational facilities comprising:digital objects, each of the digital objects comprising one or more sequences of structured data or sets of such sequences, each of the sequences or sets of sequences incorporating a work or a portion of a work or other digital information in which a party has rights or interests, or in which there is value, each of the sequences or sets of sequences being structured in a way that is interpretable by one or more of the computational facilities in the network,each of the digital objects including an identifier that uniquely identifies the digital object within the network and persists, with respect to the digital object, over a period of time that is at least as long as the existence of the digital object,an administrative mechanism that (a) is distributed among the computational facilities, (b) assures the uniqueness and persistence of the identifiers over a time period that is at least as long as the existence of the digital objects, and (c) distributes state information that includes the identifiers among computational facilities by an algorithmic process for managing the uniqueness and persistence of the identifiers, at least some of the digital objects including other structured data which is useful in processing the digital objects, including managing access to them, anda resolution mechanism that accepts unique identifiers as input and resolves each of the identifiers to state information that denotes a computational facility or other digital object that contains the digital object associated with the unique identifier.