Patent 7761570 was granted and assigned to Nominum on July, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The invention disclosure describes an extended DNS data having an extensible attribute as well as systems and methods that utilize this attribute. Typically, the extensible attribute includes both attribute data and metadata configured to indicate a type of the attribute data. By varying the metadata, different instances of the attribute data may include different data types. The attribute data is configured, for example, to characterize other fields in the extended DNS data and/or to enable new applications relating to DNS data.