Subject: [Ietf-not43] organization searches

From: ehall at ehsco.com (Eric A. Hall)
Date: Wed Aug 27 00:50:00 2003

Reading through draft-ietf-crisp-internet-resource-number-req-00.txt,
there is a call for mandatory support for organization searches. This was
in the early versions of the domain requirements too, but was watered down
to a MAY since org searches weren't part of the existing service.

This is somewhat difficult to implement in a distributed system given that
there is no centralized registry of organizations. On this same note,
whatever data gets returned is going to be specific to a partition, which
may either be the organization itself, or which may be a provider's data
about a particular organization. These are the same kinds of problems we
had with contacts, and will require the same kind of solution.

The first problem that needs to be solved is what the global identifier
for an organization should look like. The data needs to provide an
organization identifier, and also needs to provide partition hinting data
that will get the query to the right provider. With contacts, this was
relatively easy (modulo the misinterpretations), just use the email
addressing syntax. With organizations, however, there is no obvious
syntax. Domain names will take you through the domain delegation by
default, which isn't what you want. Email addresses are already
overloaded. IP addressing obviously doesn't work to identify the org. So
we're pretty much left with coming up a globally satisfactory
organizational identification syntax. Something like orghandle%partition
or orghandle!partition would be easy except for the slight syntactical
overloading. If anybody has a preference on these, please speak up.

For clarity of thought, some examples here:

    ExampleWidgets%arin.net

    ExampleWidgets!example.com

    ExampleWidgets$netsol.com   (bad for keyboards without "$")

etc. Remember that since we don't have a global index, the identifier has
to provide enough hints to get to the right partition. That or the
requirement has to be reduced to being non-global.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

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From: shane at ripe.net (Shane Kerr)
Date: Wed Aug 27 06:29:17 2003

> had with contacts, and will require the same kind of solution.

How is this any more difficult than searching for contact data?  It's the 
exact same problem, IM(ns)HO.  I don't like using e-mail syntax for 
contact data, but if you are using it for that purpose, why is it any 
problem to do a similar hack for organisations?

-- 
Shane Kerr
RIPE NCC

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From: ehall at ehsco.com (Eric A. Hall)
Date: Wed Aug 27 08:30:31 2003

on 8/27/2003 5:29 AM Shane Kerr wrote:

> How is this any more difficult than searching for contact data?  It's
> the exact same problem, IM(ns)HO.  I don't like using e-mail syntax for

That's what I was asking: choose a syntax.