Observing Spatial and Temporal Metadata in Hostnames

Abstract

In this work we present some evidence showing that spatial and temporal metadata can be mined from hostnames. Hostnames map to IPs, and a set of IP addresses relative to a specific geographic region forms an IP map. If we choose a geographic region and obtain its IP map we can study the hostname representation of the map and mine spatial and temporal information that refer to the entities that use these hostnames (metadata). In this work we choose United Kingdom to be a region of interest and we take a random sample of its IP map. Using the hostname representation of this sample we compute the spatial distribution of the infrastructure of a British ISP and a snapshot of its Internet traffic. We also compute the rate of growth of another British ISP by introducing time in hostname's representation with the help of a partial order. At last we conclude that the above spatial and temporal information can serve as an independent source for the evaluation of these companies.