Managing access to distributed resources

In the year 2003 the administration portal for Switzerland, www.ch.ch, went live. This portal is based on a powerful metadatabase of available resources and services of the public administration and allocates a unique name, a URN (uniform resource name), to every resource. The URN technology, adapted to the requirements of www.ch.ch, became an open standard and a building block of the Swiss eGovernment platform. This article sketches the URN technology. Here one establishes why URN technology represents nowadays a key factor in the success of building and operating large portals with decentralized responsibility for the resources and interlinking in vast and established federal structures. Search engines which are based on this URN technology enable searches on subject-specific areas of information as well as new forms of navigation. The present meta-database of URN: technology is already similar to UDDI in terms of structure. A vision for the Virtual Desk Switzerland is presented extending the resource registry into a transaction hub interconnecting processes that cross administrative boundaries.