Corporation for National Research Initiatives

The Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), based in Reston, Virginia, is a non-profit organization founded in 1986 by Robert E. Kahn as an "activities center around strategic development of network-based information technologies", including the National Information Infrastructure (NII) in the United States.

CNRI publishes D-Lib Magazine, a journal of digital library research and development. It also develops the Handle System for managing and locating digital information. CNRI obtained DARPA funding for the development of JPython (Jython), a Python implementation in and for Java, initially created by Jim Hugunin.

CNRI formerly operated the Secretariat of the Internet Engineering Task Force.Guido van Rossum, pioneer for open source software and creator of Python, at one time worked for this company. The formation and early funding of the Internet Society were led by CNRI. At the first meeting of the Internet Society board, Vint Cerf, representing CNRI, offered, "In the event a deficit occurs, CNRI has agreed to contribute up to USD102000 to offset it." In the event, the contribution was not needed. CNRI did cover many of the expenses of the Internet Society in 1992, They also paid Cerf's salary during 1993, when much of his time was devoted to building the Internet Society.

In 1996, the Association of American Publishers announced that R.R. Bowker and the CNRI had been selected to design a Digital Object Identifier system. The effort was initiated after a year-long study of the need for a system to identify electronic copyright ownership and to manage the digital purchase of rights. The CNRI Handle system was first demonstrated at a February 1997 meeting of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division of the AAP meeting in Washington, DC. The Handle System is a technology specification for assigning, managing, and resolving persistent identifiers for digital objects and other resources on the Internet. The DONA System is under consideration at the ITU and has been adopted by several countries.

...
Wikipedia