When users, whether human or machine, want information, it is often unimportant to them where that information resides. A collection of information aggregation environments, such as the Universal Information Object Management Environment of the specification, becomes far more useful to users if information aggregated in one environment is easily aggregated by another. By assigning a virtual globally unique identifier to each object that is made available by any information aggregator in a way that captures the information necessary to get that information from the information aggregator in a common way, all of the information aggregation environments can use any of the data in any information aggregation environment transparently.