But just as he did in the Internet's early days, Kahn continues to push quietly for more innovation, always with an eye toward openness and interoperability. As he explains his points, Kahn can come across as a slightly avuncular professor, quick to help a befuddled reporter by sketching diagrams on his notepad. Yet his academic tone is tempered with a quiet, "knows-more-than-he-lets-on" presence, born perhaps of Kahn's 13-year stay at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Now president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)--a nonprofit organization he founded in 1986 to "foster research and development for the National Information Infrastructure"--Kahn's current pet project is the Digital Object Architecture, an open architecture approach to rethinking the Internet that stresses managing information instead of just moving bits.
A key aspect of this architecture is the notion of unique persistent identifiers, which he refers to as "handles" and which are widely used in the publishing industry as a standard method for identifying and describing Internet-based content. The handle addressing system is somewhat similar to DNS addresses, with prefixes and suffixes that allow handles to be mapped to the appropriate administrative databases. Handle systems are also designed to interoperate with the current URL system.
"People need to know what you can and cannot do with information on the Net," says Kahn, explaining part of the need for unique persistent identifiers that identify individual data structures and other network resources independent of their location. A standards-based infrastructure based on the Digital Object Architecture could support many add-on applications, he says, such as one to help protect intellectual property, or to outline the terms and conditions for access to such information.
"This approach doesn't mandate enforcement," says Kahn, illustrating this point by comparing it to highway speed limits. "You know you're supposed to go 55, but there's no magnet in the sky that grabs your car and takes it to a smelter if you speed." Copyright enforcement applications can be built by others, he notes. "But first we have to come up with an underlying architecture that supports it."
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