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Navigating the virtual neighborhood has become a life skill for those needing something on the Internet and a life-or-death matter for businesses with something to offer on the Internet. To navigate—to follow a course to a goal—across any space, a method is needed for designating locations in that space. On a topographic map, each location is designated by a combination of a latitude and a longitude. In the telephone system, a telephone number designates each location. On a street map, locations are designated by street addresses.

A message from a sender to a receiver may be broken into multiple packets, each of which may follow a different path through the Internet. Information in the packets’ headers enables the message to be restored to its proper order at its destination. ” They are, typically, connected to the Internet through an Internet service provider (ISP) that handles the necessary technical and administrative arrangements. A distinctive feature of the Internet is that all the user services (such as e-mail or the World Wide Web) accessible through it are provided by applications running on computers located at its edges.

In these processes, there is no guarantee of unique names for objects. More generally, naming is used to distinguish individual objects within a broad class, the object space. The set of allowable names for objects in that class is called the name space. A name is then a member of that set used to differentiate one member of the object class from another. A naming system is the combination of an object space, the name space that is applied to it, the rules governing the assignment of names to objects, the files recording the assignments, and the administrative processes (if any) applying the rules and maintaining the files.