I've found a very cool page with a quite cogent explanation of the several internet standards involved with naming and locating resources on the internet, in distributed databases, etc. etc. I haven't looked at the author's (Norm Walsh) proposal for dealing with some of the associated mysteries generically, but his explanation of what those are is very readable, and he is a well informed fellow at ArborText, an important player in the distributed documentation world.

It is at http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/Norm_s_Column/Issue_Three/issue_three.ht...

Bob Morris

p.s. Norm's column shtick is incidentally interesting to biologists:

Title: Standard Deviation from Norm. This column: If you can name it, you can claim it.