How does the Handle System compare to LDAP?
At the infrastructure level, the Handle System allows individual namespaces to be registered and later discovered by any application over the Internet. Namespaces registered under the Handle System are unique, and queries will always be directed to the responsible handle server for resolution. An LDAP server typically runs in isolation, with service referrals from one namespace to another performed at the peer level when available. At the individual server level, handle servers are more efficient than LDAP servers for name-attribute resolution. Handle servers have better security mechanisms (e.g., service integrity, data confidentiality and authenticity etc.) for name-attribute binding in a distributed environment. LDAP severs, on the other hand, provide attribute-based searching, a capability that handle servers don’t provide by themselves. For attribute based searching, One might use a dedicated search engine (e.g., Lucene/Google) running as a separate process against the underlying
