Identification and Management of Distributed Data

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Domain Naming System

Hosts are identified in the Internet by means of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Despite the use of the dotted decimal notation to try to make IP addresses easier for humans to handle, they are still expressed as collections of numbers that are comparable in length to a traditional telephone number. Although this length is shorter than IPv6 numbers, it still makes it unlikely that human beings will easily remember very many IPv4 addresses.

Certainly a name is much easier to remember than a collection of numbers. Thus, telephone numbers are usually stored in “address books,” where users can search by providing a string corresponding to the name of the entity (person or organization) they are seeking.

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