SOA Glossary - namespace

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This glossary supports the following titles:

SOA Governance

SOA with .NET & Azure

SOA Design Patterns

Web Service Contract Design & Versioning for SOA

SOA Principles of Service Design

Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design

Modern SOA Infrastructure: Technology, Design, and Governance

SOA with REST: Principles, Patterns & Constraints

Next Generation SOA: A Real-World Guide to Modern Service-Oriented Computing

SOA with Java

SOA Security: Practices, Patterns, and Technologies for Securing Services

SOA and Cloud Computing: Practices, Patterns, Technologies

This glossary also supports the SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) program.

For more information, visit: www.soacp.com
and
www.soaschool.com

namespace

(contributed by Andre Tost and Priscilla Walmsley)

A namespace is a means of adding groups of XML elements and attributes to a common scope. This allows distinguishing between elements that have the same name, simply by adding them to different namespaces. A namespace is represented by a URI, typically a URL, but within an XML document, an abbreviation called the "namespace prefix" is used. There are standard industry namespaces as well as user-defined namespaces.

The following example shows how three different namespaces are used to uniquely differentiate between three identically named XML elements. This example is from Chapter 4 of the book Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA:

The following diagram illustrates how namespaces are used to establish domains within the XML vocabulary for a hardware store, thereby allowing different elements to have the same name with different meanings.