The JISC Information Environment The Distributed National
Electronic Resource (DNER)  is a JISC-funded, managed,
heterogeneous collection of information resources and services
(bibliographic, full-text, image, video, geo-spatial, datasets,
etc.) of particular value to the further and higher education
communities. The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE)  is the
set of networked services that allows people to discover,
access, use and publish resources within the DNER. The JISC IE
technical architecture  specifies the standards and protocols
that provide interoperability between this network of services.
The current version of the JISC IE architecture focuses on the
discovery of and access to resources within the DNER. It is not
the intention of this article to provide a detailed description
of the architecture. However, the following overview will allow
us to make some comparisons between the JISC IE and emerging
architectures based on Web services. The architecture suggests a
three-layer model comprising a