Solving names within X500

An easily name service is an important asset for the management of a network and a standard service like X.500 could enhance considerably the operation of heterogeneous networks based on the OSI suite. However, the naming scheme used by X.500 is complex and not necessarily user friendly. In this paper, after a short presentation of X.500 operations and names we wil justify a proposition to use untyped "short forms" made of sequences of text tokens and we will develop a set of algorithms for accessing the directory with these short names, before giving comparison and measures of these algorithms. This short form of names is compatible with the naming scheme used in internet, so that we could retain the simplicity and ease of use of the internet naming system, while being compatible with the complete X.500 standard. Our solution is particularly useful for the category of names that can be found for example when interfacing mail to X.500 and where resolution time is critical due to queues of waiting queries