Archived: 8 March 2006
The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a highly distributed name resolution system that is a key component of Internet services. Although the data contained in the DNS can be changed easily, the structure and nature of the data cannot be changed as easily due to key assumptions made in the design and implementation of the DNS. Rendering the information management aspects of the DNS as a knowledge domain allows movement beyond implementation-locked limitations. Ontologies provide a means of modelling and representing knowledge domains and we propose the use of ontologies to represent the logical, representational and functional aspects of the DNS. The ontology is constructed using OWL, RDF and the XML representation of these. This method of representation allows the replacement of the slow, manual and error-prone process that is currently used to update the way that DNS operates with a rapid, machine-realisable procedure.
Keywords: domain name system, ontology, OWL, distributed systems, semantic web