The Handle System is a proprietary registry assigning persistent identifiers, or handles, to information resources, and for resolving "those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, and otherwise make use of the resources". As with handles used elsewhere in computing, Handle System handles are opaque, and encode no information about the underlying resource, being bound only to metadata regarding the resource. Consequently, the handles are not rendered invalid by changes to the metadata. The system was developed by Bob Kahn at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) as a part of the Digital Object Architecture (DOA). The original work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) between 1992 and 1996, as part of a wider framework for distributed digital object services, and was thus contemporaneous with the early deployment of the World Wide Web, with similar goals. More information...
According to PR-model, hdl.handle.net is ranked 66th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 34th in English Wikipedia.
The website is placed before news.google.com and after officialcharts.com in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
