RFC 1384 (rfc1384) - Page 2 of 12

Naming Guidelines for Directory Pilots

RFC 1384                   Naming Guidelines                January 1993


      organisation which operates in more than one country, but is not
      supra-national.  This classification includes the large commercial
      organisations whose production and sales are spread throughout a
      large number of countries.

      International organisations, may be registered at the top level.
      This will not be done for multi-national organisations.  The only
      international organisation registered so far is:  Internet.  This
      is not a formal registration, but is adopted for the Internet
      Directory Service.

   Localities
      A few localities will be registered under the root.  The chief
      purpose of these locality entries is to provide a "natural" parent
      node for organisations which are supra-national, and yet which do
      not have global authority in their particular field.  Such
      organisations will usually be governmental or quasi-governmental.
      Example localities might include: Europe, Africa, West Indies.
      Example organisations within Europe might include: European Court
      of Justice, European Space Agency, European Commission.

   DSA Information
      Some information on DSAs may be needed at the top level.  This
      should be kept to a minimum.

   The only directory information for which there is a recognised top
   level registration authority is countries.  Registration of other
   information at the top level may potentially cause problems.  At this
   stage, it is argued that the benefits of additional top level
   registration outweighs these problems.  However, this potential
   problem should be noted by anyone making use of such a registration.

2.2  The DNS within the DIT

   The rules for the DNS parts of the DIT are defined in [3].  One
   modification to this is that the DNS tree will be rooted under
   "O=Internet", rather than at the root of the DIT.

2.3  Access control

   An entry's object class attribute, and any attribute(s) used for
   naming an entry are of special significance and may be considered to
   be "structural".  Any inability to access these attributes will often
   militate against successful querying of the Directory.  For example,
   user interfaces typically limit the scope of their searches by
   searching for entries of a particular type, where the type of entry
   is indicated by its object class.  Thus, unless the intention is to
   bar public access to an entry or set of entries, the object class and



Barker & Hardcastle-Kille