The standard aims to establish a web domain naming guideline for government and semi-government entities throughout the Kingdom of Bahrain to ensure that all websites are more usable and familiar to the public and that domain names are under the direction of the Kingdom. This will reduce the possibility of undesirable domains being misinterpreted as official government sites and also to obtain public trust in government websites through the use of the .gov.bh domain. In the Kingdom of Bahrain, domain name registration for Government and semi-Government organization is handled by the Information and eGovernment Authority (IGA).

A domain name is the name that identifies a Web site. It is rather easy to remember and associated with one or more IP addresses. The domain name for the eGovernment Authority’s website is: iga.gov.bh. The domain name has three different levels separated by a period ”.” within the domain name.

• Top level domains are the last part of the domain name; for example ,"bh"
• Second level domains are directly below top-level domains: for example, "gov.bh"
• Third level domains are directly below the second level domains: for example, "iga.gov.bh"
• Sub domains are written before the domain names: for example, "services.iga.gov.bh"

Objectives:

The objectives of this standard are to:

• Align all governmental websites with the official government domain (.gov.bh)
• To ensure that all governmental public websites are clearly branded
• Promote the Kingdom’s government brand for all online services, and present them as the authoritative sources of trusted and accurate content
• To enable the creation of effective and easy to remember URLs (Uniform Resource Locator)
• To assure the citizens that public government websites are accountable for the website content

2.3.1 Domain Naming Guidelines
2.3.2 URL Standards and Naming Conventions

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