The management of the distributed system resources is federated across many autonomous sites. This includes name spaces where different portions are managed by independent parties yet combine to form one unified name space.
Some services may require a consistent name space. There can not be dangling references. A database is an example. Some service, such as the web, exist quite well in a name space that is incomplete and inconsistent. Both kinds of name spaces can coexist. In fact, portions of the name space can be consistent while other sections may be untrustworthy.