Structure-free Name Management for Evolving Distributed Environments.
Douglas B. Terry · International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems · 1986
Name services facilitate sharing in distributed environments by allowing objects to be named unambiguously and maintaining a set of application-defined attributes for each named object. Existing distributed name services, which manage names based on their syntactic structure, may lack the flexibility needed by large, diverse, and evolving computing communities. A new approach, structure-free name management, separates three activities: choosing names, selecting the storage sites for object attributes, and resolving an object’s name to its attributes. Administrative entities apportion the responsibility for managing various names, while the name service’s information needed to locate an object’s attributes can be independently reconfigured to improve performance or meet changing demands. CR