AS 4019.1-1992

Provides the Directory capabilities required by OSI applications, OSI management processes, other OSI layer entities, and telecommunications services. Among the capabilities which it provides are those of 'user-friendly naming', whereby objects can be referred to by names which are suitable for citing by human users (though not all objects need have user-friendly names). This Standard is identical with and has been reproduced from ISO/IEC 9594-1:1990.

The Directory provides the directory capabilities required by OSI applications, OSI management processes,other OSI layer entities, and telecommunications services. Among the capabilities which it provides are those of'user-friendly naming', whereby objects can be referred to by names which are suitable for citing by human users(though not all objects need have user-friendly names); and 'name-to-address mapping' which allows the bindingbetween objects and their locations to be dynamic. The latter capability allows OSI networks, for example, to be'self-configuring' in the sense that addition, removal and the changes of object location do not affect OSI networkoperation.The Directory is not intended to be a general-purpose database system, although it may be built on suchsystems. It is assumed, for instance, that, as is typical with communications directories, there is a considerablyhigher frequency of 'queries' than of updates. The rate of updates is expected to be governed by the dynamics ofpeople and organizations, rather than, for example, thedynamics of networks. There is also no need for instantaneous global commitment of updates: transientconditions where both old and new versions of the same information are available, are quite acceptable.It is a characteristic of the Directory that, except as a consequence of differing access rights or unpropagatedupdates, the results of directory queries will not be dependent on the identity or location of the enquirer. Thischaracteristic renders the Directory unsuitable for some telecommunications applications, for example some types of routing.

First published as AS 4019.1-1992.