RFC 1218 (rfc1218) - Page 2 of 23

Naming scheme for c=US

RFC 1218                A Naming Scheme for c=US              April 1991


   users may work on a joint research project, using electronic mail as
   their primary means of communication.

   However, networks themselves are built on an underlying naming and
   numbering infrastructure, usually in the form of names and addresses.
   For example, some authority must exist to assign network addresses to
   ensure that numbering collisions do not occur.  This is of paramount
   importance for an environment which consists of multiple service
   providers.

2.  Approach

   It should be observed that there are several different naming
   universes that can be realized in the Directory Information Tree
   (DIT).  For example, geographical naming, community naming, political
   naming, organizational naming, and so on.  The choice of naming
   universe largely determines the difficulty in mapping a user's query
   into a series of Directory operations.  Although it is possible to
   simultaneously support multiple naming universes with the DIT, this
   is likely to be unnatural.  As such, this proposal focuses on a
   single naming universe.

   The naming universe in this proposal is based on civil authority.
   That is, it uses the existing civil naming infrastructure and
   suggests a (nearly) straight-forward mapping on the DIT.  There are
   four components to the naming architecture:

   (1)  civil naming and optimized civil naming, which reflects
        names assigned by civil authority;

   (2)  organizational naming, which reflects names assigned
        within organizations;

   (3)  ADDMD naming, which reflects names assigned to public
        providers within the Directory service; and,

   (4)  application naming, which reflects names assigned to OSI
        entities.

   An important characteristic is that entries should be listed wherever
   searches for them are likely to occur.  This implies that a single
   object may be listed under several entries.

2.1.  Names and User-Friendliness

   It must be emphasized that there are three distinct concepts which
   are often confused when discussing a naming scheme:




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