This name-spacing standard was formal introduced at the ICMC 2008. The formal paper can be found here. What follows is a summary and illustration of use.

Purpose

The standard aims to provide a universal method of communicating control data between multiple applications, local and remotely accessible, with dynamic data structures. It proposes the use of Open Sound Control between applications however the standard does not use any specific OSC features and so may be used with other transports.

Uses

Open Sound Control
Namespace methods based on OSC style namespaces and URL addresses.
TCP/IP and UDP

In use

The standard communicates information through reserved and unreserved namespaces.

Reserved namespaces are,

/test – establish basic connectivity and performance
/setup – establish dynamic auto configuration
/chat – user chat space
/app – application communication space
/user – specific to individual user
/time – temporal transit information
/documentation – location for documentation
/hardware – physical hardware locations

This reserved namespaces most occupy the primary namespace in any message however they may be encapsulated as required.

Conventions

Name spaces should provide as much context as possible to information encapsulated
/hardware – name space descriptive of source
other name spaces – names descriptive of target

Quickee

Say Bob wants to communicate groove~ commands across a WIFI network.

He is running Max/MSP so Bob sends the commands within namespace

/user/bob/app/MaxMSP/groove

This message is sent on to his chosen transit layer.