In their 2002 book, “Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms”, Andrew Tannenbaum and Martin van Steen describe 
in great detail the properties, function, and benefit of naming schemes in distributed systems [Tannenbaum].  
Specifically, they describe a typical three-layer naming scheme whereby human readable names map to location-independent
 names or identifiers, which in turn map to location-dependent addresses.  This three-tiered approach is instrumental in
 providing both usability for clients, as well as many of the classic distributed systems “transparencies” like fault 
and location transparency.  WS-Naming [WS-Naming] provides the mapping between location-independent names (in the form 
of EndpointIdentifiers) and location-dependent addresses (i.e., WS-Addressing EPRs).  In this specification we describe 
the Resource Namespace Service (RNS), a grid port type that allows clients to manipulate and retrieve mappings from 
human-readable strings to WS-Addressing Endpoint Reference Types , thus providing the higher level mapping described by 
Tannenbaum and van Steen.