The NIST Identifier Collaboration Service or NICS, was a general-purpose registry for identifiers, implemented in Tcl, and designed in part to be used to manage resources such as namespaces within Tcl.
Further information on how NICS worked, moved here from How to build good packages:
You can register namespaces at:
http://www.nist.gov/nics (404)
(Quote from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tcl-faq/part2/ :)
035. An interesting site is http://pitch.nist.gov/nics/ (404), which is a database registry for various domains of topics. Don Libes has created a Tcl domain where one can, for instance, do a search for rand and find pointers to various implementations of random number generators for Tcl. The NICS paper Don presented at one of the Tcl conferences is found at [L1 ]. See also the news article [L2 ] (lost) for an explanation Don posted to comp.lang.tcl. A domain has also been created at the NIST Identifier Collaboration Service for Tcl object types.
The Wayback Machine shows the old NICS website: