Exploring WMI Namespaces
The PowerShell CIM cmdlets enable you to retrieve, update, and remove information from the CIM database and subscribe to and handle WMI events. The CIM database organizes its data into sets of classes within a hierarchical set of namespaces. A namespace is, in effect, a container holding WMI classes.
The name of the root WMI namespace is ROOT
, although WMI is not overly consistent about capitalization, as you may notice. A namespace can contain classes as well as additional child namespaces. For example, the root namespace has a child namespace, CIMV2
, which you refer to as ROOT\CIMV2
. This namespace also has child namespaces.
Every namespace in the CIM database, including ROOT
, has a special system class called __NAMESPACE
. This class contains the names of child namespaces within the current namespaces. Thus, in the namespace ROOT
, the __NAMESPACE
class includes an instance for the CIMV2
child namespace. Since this class exists inside every namespace...