Lost in a labyrinth of workstations

Two efforts at descriptive name service for workstations are discussed. The Networked Resource Discovery Project proposes to use signposts to locate resources. This approach is effective in the search for one of many instances of a service. Nomenclator is a system that combines maps with signs. Early Nomenclator results indicate that there are significant performance advantages to be had by using a combination of signs and maps to locate resources. If this approach to descriptive name services is pursued, it is argued that users will not become lost in a labyrinth of workstations