By virtue of their success, URLs are actually becoming an inappropriate technology on which to base information infrastructures. This does not mean that URLs per se will literally stop working at some point in the near future, but the increase in dangling links and the loading on international Internet links may give the impression that this has already happened!
The dangling links problem is exascerpated by the current practice of closely linking meta-information about a resource with the resource itself.
Uniform Resource Identifiers are being developed which try to address these issues, but these are still a subject for research. URNs and URCs are being deployed on an experimental basis, but it appears that large scale pilots will be necessary in order to determine their characteristics.
Emerging technologies such as centroids and multicast offer a completely different view of the world, but there is very little experience with them as yet. Of the work which has been done to date on using IP multicast in this area, e.g. [52], issues of scaling and bandwidth utilization have not been prime concerns.
This report has identified two scenarios for URN resolution which may benefit from the use of the experimental SIMPLE DISCOVERY PROTOCOL, and which will in turn provide useful feedback by stressing this technology to its limits.
In further work the author will attempt to model the behaviour of SDP as an abstract naming service for URN resolution - over the current and projected future MBONE topology, with the aim of ascertaining the protocol's performance and determining whether there are any problems with the current design.
Finally, it should be noted that security issues have not been addressed in the report.