1. Introduction

   Information related to the Internet Network Infrastructure is created
   and stored by a number of different organizations, such as the
   Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), Internet Registry (IR),
   Network Information Centers (NICs), and the NSFNET Network Operations
   Center (NOC).  This information is generally "mastered" (stored and
   maintained) by these organizations on a centralized basis, i.e.,
   there is a single place to look for a definitive list of entries for
   these categories.  This has worked well in the past but given the
   tremendous growth of the Internet and its number of users and
   networks, it is essential that a distributed schema be used.

   The X.500 Directory offers the appropriate technology for
   implementing this distributed method of managing network
   infrastructure information.

   The following goals are addressed in this document:

    o Provision of IP specific images of network elements
    o Mapping from Network Number to network, owner, provider etc.
    o Support of delegation of IP address blocks
    o Storage of high-level routing policies and AS information
    o Support of "classless" network address formats

    o Provision of several organizational images of a network

   It may be noted that the document basically consists of two parts.
   In the first part, an IP specific extension of the general framework
   "Charting networks in the Directory" [1] is given.  Objects defined
   by the application of this framework are related to IP numbers. An IP
   namespace is defined in the second part of this paper, referring to
   IP network elements defined at the beginning.