Locating distributed information

General techniques are first examined for managing distributed information and how various evaluation criteria, when applied to the techniques, are affected by the parameters and scale of a problem. Then the use of the techniques and criteria is illustrated for the problems of locating service and server status information, as well as determining the current status of a user in a distributed environment. In each case, the best technique to use for the problem based on its parameters is obtained.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>