For many years, the naming convention "@" has served the ARPANET user community for its mail system, and the substring "" has been used for other applications such as file transfer (FTP) and terminal access (Telnet). With the advent of network interconnection, this naming convention needs to be generalized to accommodate internetworking. A decision has recently been reached to replace the simple name field, "", by a composite name field, "" [2]. This note is an attempt to clarify this generalized naming convention, the Internet Naming Convention, and to explore the implications of its adoption for Internet name service and user applications. The following example illustrates the changes in naming convention: ARPANET Convention: Fred@ISIF Internet Convention: Fred@F.ISI.ARPA The intent is that the Internet names be used to form a tree-structured administrative dependent, rather than a strictly topology dependent, hierarchy. The left-to-right string of name components proceeds from the most specific to the most general, that is, the root of the tree, the administrative universe, is on the right.

The name service for realizing the Internet naming convention is assumed to be application independent. It is not a part of any particular application, but rather an independent name service serves different user applicationsThe Internet naming convention is based on the domain concept. The name of a domain consists of a concatenation of one or more . A domain can be considered as a region of jurisdiction for name assignment and of responsibility for name-to-address translation. The set of domains forms a hierarchy.

The collection of arcs, where arcs are identified by ordered pairs of distinct nodes [1]. Each node of the graph represents a domain. An ordered pair (B, A), an arc from B to A, indicates that B is a subdomain of domain A, and B is a simple name unique within A. We will refer to B as a child of A, and A a parent of B. The directed graph that best describes the naming hierarchy is called an "in-tree", which is a rooted tree with all arcs directed towards the root (Figure 1). The root of the tree represents the naming universe, ancestor of all domains. Endpoints (or leaves) of the tree are the lowest-level domains.

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