Abstract: An information handling system includes one or more work stations, each work station including one or more processing units, a memory system, and one or more I/O controllers all connected to a system bus, the I/O controllers controlling various input/output devices such as a keyboard, a mouse, a display device, communications adapters and the like, an operating system control means employing object oriented technology, and means for providing a persistent, distributed object name service. An object class is modeled as a set of relationships. One or more files are constructed which exist in the file system, each of the files capturing the semantics of the naming context objects.