View500 Directory Server

View500 Directory and Discovery Server delivers a set of solutions to the Identity & Access Management market and a broad spectrum of applications involving XML repositories. The product consists of:

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[+] View500 Directory Server

eB2Bcom's View500 Directory Server provides organisations with a fast, scalable and flexible directory system. It has been developed strictly adhering to open standards and features support for the X.500, LDAP, XLDAP and ACP133 Standards. Being standards compliant, View500 will interface with a variety of applications.

The public, government and business need for rapid and accurate searching for information is widespread and growing quickly. Information accuracy, availability and accessibility are the factors that allow communication and interaction between people, business and government.

Directories are increasingly being used for this purpose, and there are many suppliers of these - particularly those using the LDAP standards. However often these directories (and relational databases) do not provide functions or facilities that are necessary for a particular application, resulting in poor performance and user dissatisfaction.

In general, directory solutions available in the market provide Soundex search, however this is only a single method of searching for a particular search field, View500 can offer any number of approximate search methods and combine the results to produce a concise list of results. This makes View500 unique in its ability to produce high quality search results as it facilitates a far richer and satisfying user experience when searching for information when compared to other directory technologies. The choice of which search methods to apply to each searchable attribute or combinations of attributes in View500 is completely configurable and specified in the directory schema.

View500 Directory server is not just another LDAP directory as it provides:
• World leading approximate matching, making information retrieval highly flexible and user friendly,
• Component matching which enables high speed search performance
• An integrated Web-based configurable User Interface
• Deep “tree” structures that reflect real organizations. This enables ‘point and click’ “Machinery-of-Government” or organizational structure changes, whilst retaining referential integrity
• Powerful extended Access Control capabilities
• Online Organisation Charting, Alternate Hierarchies and Selective Reporting
• Unparalleled syntax support (“intelligent storage”) – over twice the nearest alternative
• Extensible syntax support through XML Schema
• High integrity replication across multiple servers.
• Native support for XML including component match search of detail content

In summary, View500 isn't simply a network application used to hold user credentials, nor is it a relational database with an LDAP front end It is a purpose built directory server with a comprehensive list of features developed specifically for that task. Download Whitepaper

The View500 Brochure

Industry Standards page

[+] View500 Discovery Server

A searchable registry, or discovery service, is an essential part of many XML-based applications. For example, the Registry Services of ebXML, the Discovery Services of the Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS), the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS), the XACML Policy Information Point and Policy Administration Point , the Global Justics Data Exchange Model Registry (GJDXML) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) when used as a discovery service for Web Services. One thing that these independently developed registry and discovery services have in common is that they are application-specific.
That is, the format for records in each registry and the protocol operations (sometimes called interfaces) for creating, destroying, modifying and searching the records in the registry are designed specifically with regard to, and only with regard to, the real-world objects of interest to that application.

However, there is considerable overlap in terms of the real-world objects described by the records in each registry. For example, records containing information about organizations and their staff are common among discovery services. Since each registry uses different record formats and operations an organization deploying two or more of these applications would find itself having to administer duplicate information through differing means.

While some of the application-specific discovery services are claimed to be extensible, extensions to the service can only be effected through additional software development. To support new record formats for additional kinds of real-world objects, or additional properties for existing records, it is necessary to extend the existing standardized protocol operations or implement new protocol operations to add, delete, modify and search the new records or properties (we might call this compile-time extensibility, as opposed to run-time extensibility). Rather than being just application-specific, with such extensions a discovery service becomes vendor or customer specific, to the detriment of interoperability with other implementations of the "same" discovery service.

To greater and lesser degrees, each discovery service specification and/or discovery service implementation has to address a common set of database functions: persistent storage and retrieval, atomic updates, query evaluation, query optimization (e.g. indexing), transactional recovery, transactional consistency, data distribution, replication, authentication and authorization (access controls). So not only is there duplication in terms of the information held across the different registries, but there is also duplication of effort with regard to understanding, specifying and implementing these different registries.

Overall, the various application-specific discovery services are trying to do much the same thing with much the same data about the same real world objects, but are inventing different, incompatible ways to represent and administer that data.

View500 provides for XML-based Applications to specify and implement a general purpose discovery server with no built-in preconceptions about the real-world objects, and the properties thereof, that need to be registered and subsequently discovered. This allows a single service to satisfy the registration and discovery requirements of a large range of applications and purposes. Data that is common to those applications is stored once by the service and is administered in one place.

This architecture can be represented diagrammatically as follows.

How the Architecture is Today

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How the Architecture is With View500

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Essential parts of View500 are:
1) A flexible general framework in which to describe the record format for representing objects of interest to a registry and the formats of properties of those objects, i.e. the schema for a registry. The properties are possibly complex structured data. Since different registries can involve the same real-world objects it is expected that some parts of schema will be shared by several registries, as will the data itself.

2) The ability to configure the server at run-time with the schema for one or more registries and to extend the schema for an existing registry. With knowledge of the schema for a registry, the server will be able to enforce the correct format for registrations and preserve any consistency and integrity constraints on the registry data.

3) A set of generic protocol operations to create, destroy, modify and search the records of any registry managed by the server. So for example, instead of a separate operation to create a record for each kind of real-world object there is one create operation that takes the kind of object as a parameter (along with the set of properties relevant to an object of that kind as described by the schema for the registry). The search operation will give the users the capability to search on any part or parts of structured properties.

View500, by providing a general purpose discovery service, circumvents the creation of yet more application-specific discovery services (with all the needless duplication and reinvention that entails), and in time, to replace the existing application-specific discovery services. In the meantime the interfaces of these application-specific discovery services can be supported through simple translation layers on top of View500. A translation layer converts data between the application-specific formats and the more general formats used by View500 and converts the application-specific protocol operations into the generic operations of View500.

[+] View500 Management Agent (VMA)

[+] View500 XACML Policy Server

[+] View500 Synchronisation and Integration Smart Connector

[+] View500 Policy, Obligations and Privacy Server (VOPS)

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