DIRECTORY SERVICES: Ecommerce Yellow Pages

Few phenomena in

history have matched the explosive and rapid growth of the world wide web.

Starting as a means of exchanging information among researchers, it has rapidly

developed into one of the largest communication mediums in the world.

Entrepreneurs were quick to see the potential of this new medium–the only one

among the mass media to possess the characteristic of two-way communication.

Like the other mass media, the web could make information available to a vast

audience. However, the unique ability to provide two-way communication implied

that the web could also carry back responses from the audience, thus providing

the ability to carry out commercial transactions. The ubiquity and speed of the

underlying communication medium promised to provide a single universal

marketplace that spanned the entire world.

Challenges

Quantitatively,

the growth of the web has been extremely rapid by any standards. The number of

users has increased from virtually nothing in 1995 to 200 million in 1999 and is

expected to double to 400 million by the year 2002. These 400 million users are

expected to generate about $600 billion in commercial transactions, an almost

tenfold increase in value from 1999. Achieving this impressive growth will

require overcoming a number of data management challenges.

ENTERPRISE DATA MANAGEMENT:

Fully automated ecommerce requires that enterprise data be consistent and

up-to-date. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case. Historically, each

department in a company maintained its own information, which was manually kept

consistent with the information in other departments. Computerization led to the

situation where each department became an ‘island of automation’, but

enterprise-wide functions could not be automated due to inconsistent data. For

example, the employee address may be maintained in both the human relations and

finance databases. In the case of a change, the employee may have the

responsibility of notifying both departments, or there may be an ad hoc

procedure for one department to notify the other. Untangling this maze of

overlapping information and keeping the information in these different databases

in sync is not a task for the faint at heart.

PERSONAL DATA IDENTITY

MANAGEMENT: The interactive

characteristic of the web poses a great danger to privacy. In other mass media,

such as TV, it is difficult to collect detailed personal data about individuals

by observing the material they watch, since such data cannot be collected. The

two-way communication nature of the web, on the other hand, makes obtaining such

data easy. Since most democratic societies agree that some degree of privacy is

desirable, this is a difficult problem. For instance, most individuals would

agree that it is undesirable for strangers to guess that one may have a health

problem by observing the fact that one is visiting websites dealing with health

information.

The challenge of identity

management has two aspects. The first aspect is that each website can, by

analysis of usage patterns, obtain information about individuals. The second

aspect is that websites can pool information to obtain greater information about

individuals than these individuals could realize.

SYSTEM AND NETWORK MANAGEMENT:

As the internet becomes pervasive, the number of workstations and servers in

enterprises will increase. As a result, the cost of maintaining these machines

will rise. Some studies have indicated that the annual maintenance cost of a

computer is approximately equal to the combined price of the hardware and the

software. That is, the cost of maintaining a system costing around Rs1 lakh is

Rs1 lakh per year! While this may be extreme, there is no doubt that the

maintenance cost of a system is significant and it would be ironic if the

productivity gains from using the internet were to be lost due to the increased

cost of maintenance.

Directories: Yellow Pages of

the network

The closest

analogy to a directory service in everyday life is the Yellow Pages in a

telephone directory. The Yellow Pages may contain a list of businesses, divided

into various classifications such as florists and restaurants. A classification

can be divided into sub-classifications. For example, restaurants can be

sub-divided into Indian restaurants and Chinese restaurants. These could be

further sub-divided into south Indian and north Indian restaurants. The listing

for each restaurant would contain information about the restaurant.

In a similar manner, an

enterprise directory may contain information about all the entities–users,

computer systems and printers–present on the network. At the highest level,

the information is typically sub-divided by geographical location. At the next

level, the information can be further sub-divided by organizational units, such

as department or group. At a lower level, there would be entities in the

enterprise, such as users, together with information about the entities, such as

the address of the user or the computer systems they can access. Different types

of information can be stored for different types of entities–for instance, it

is not necessary to define a postal address field for computer systems.

Additionally, directory services provide a feature not provided by Yellow Pages–users

are restricted to only the information they are authorized to access. In other

words, unlike the Yellow Pages, a directory service stores information securely

and offers only secure access.

Though such features seem simple,

they are powerful. The key features of a directory service are:

• the ability
  
  to store structured information about entities.

• the ability
  
  to make information available even over a widely dispersed geographic area.

• fault-tolerance.

• interfaces
  
  specialized for searching for information about entities.

• internal
  
  organization specialized for searching for information.

• scalability,
  
  both in terms of the amount of information that can be stored and the number
  
  of searches that can be made every second.

These features can be summarized

by saying that an enterprise directory should have the capability to make

enterprise information available enterprise-wide.

How can directory services be

used to solve the problems described earlier? In all the solutions, the ability

of directories to make information securely available over the network, and

provide information in response to searches are important.

ENTERPRISE DATA MANAGEMENT:

A typical enterprise today suffers from information indigestion, due to the

multiple overlapping and inconsistent databases present. Some commercially

available directory services offer meta-directory services that can be used to

solve this problem. Meta-directory services allow a directory server to keep

specialized information about other directory servers in addition to information

about entities on the network. The directory service is notified that the

employee address is duplicated in the databases. It will then use its

consistency-enforcing mechanisms to ensure that any change made to any one of

the databases will be propagated to the others.

IDENTITY MANAGEMENT: A

fundamental concern today is that the world wide web can rapidly lead to a

complete loss of privacy. The problems are that websites can infer information

about individuals from the websites they visit, and that by pooling information,

websites can deduce more information than most individuals realize they are

giving away. Since the major function of directories is to store information

about entities, including individuals, they have a crucial role to play in the

management of identities. Privacy-enhancing technologies allow individuals to

control the amount of information they reveal, or even take on multiple

identities. A directory would need technology that allows users to define

multiple identities–referred to as profiles–in the directory. These

identities can be completely different from the individual’s true identity and

contain only the information the individual wants to reveal for that identity.

For example, an individual may define a personal identity for visiting websites

of personal interest and a professional identity for other sites. In the

personal identity, the user may choose not to reveal any income information.

Whenever the individual visits a website, an identity can be selected. Since

this identity can be completely different from the individual’s real identity,

it is impossible to infer anything about the individual. If the website asks for

any information, like during registration, the directory service will reveal

only the information appropriate for that identity. Therefore, even by pooling

information from multiple websites, only the information that the individual has

decided to reveal can be obtained.

System and network management

Directories

can also cure problems caused by rapidly escalating system management costs.

This arises from the ability of directories to provide network-wide information.

Therefore, directories can be used to store policies, which define how to

configure arbitrary computer systems or subsystems. A policy can be used to

define the preferred desktop configuration, including applications and

wallpaper, of an individual user. Since directory information is available

network-wide, this information can be retrieved to restore this configuration on

any desktop the user logs in on the network. The directory service can also

ensure that all members of a particular department have access to a particular

set of applications by associating an appropriate policy with the department,

which is likely to be a sub-division in the directory. Thus the directory is

used to solve the major maintenance problem of software installation and

configuration. Additionally, an inventory control component stores in the

directory hardware and software components of all systems in the

enterprise. As a result, the directory will contain an up-to-date inventory that

can be used by asset management and financial analysis programs. The application

of these concepts is widening.

Dr DINAKAR

SITARAM