CIP (Common Indexing Protocol) (Linktionary term)

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CIP (Common Indexing Protocol)

Note: Many topics at this site are reduced versions of the text in "The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications." Search results will not be as extensive as a search of the book's CD-ROM.

CIP is an evolution and refinement of Whois++, an Internet protocol for finding information about resources on networks. CIP provides a way for information servers to know the contents of other information servers by exchanging index information. Once indexes are exchanged, a server can look in its own index to answer a query, or look in the indexes received from other servers to see if the query can be answered elsewhere.

CIP is an indexing protocol that defines methods for creating and exchanging index information among indexing servers. It distributes searches across several instances of a single type of search engine to create a global directory. CIP can tie individual databases into distributed data warehouse.

This topic continues in "The Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications."

The following Internet RFCs provide additional information:

RFC 2651 (The Architecture of the Common Indexing Protocol, August 1999) defines the CIP architecture.
RFC 2653 (CIP Transport Protocols, August 1999) describe how CIP requests, responses, and index objects may be carried over TCP, mail, and HTTP.

RFC 2655 (CIP Index Object Format for SOIF Objects, August 1999) describes SOIF (Summary Object Interchange Format), a machine-readable syntax for transmitting summary objects among servers.

RFC 2656 (Registration Procedures for SOIF Template Types, August 1999) describes how interoperability is provided by registering well-known templates.

RFC 2654 (A Tagged Index Object for use in the Common Indexing Protocol, August 1999) defines how index update information can be exchanged, rather than exchanging entire databases.