[ssac-gnso-irdwg] Fwd: A possible W3C question re display of Internationalized Registration Data

[Steve Crocker <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks,

I mentioned this morning I had asked Thomas Roessler about the  
possibility of involving the W3C in our inquiry.  I suspect W3C has  
already dealt with similar problems.  Here's Thomas' reply to me.   
Note that he raises the question of funding for W3C staff at the end  
of his response.
Steve


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Thomas Roessler <tlr@xxxxxx>
> Date: December 4, 2009 5:31:17 AM EST
> To: Steve Crocker <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Thomas Roessler <tlr@xxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: A possible W3C question re display of Internationalized  
> Registration Data
> On 24 Nov 2009, at 16:12, Steve Crocker wrote:
>
> > Thomas,
> >
> > I am sitting on a call for the newly constituted Internationalized  
> > Registration Data (IRD) Working Group.  One key focus is how to  
> > display the registration information, i.e. "whois data", when the  
> > data is collected in various languages.
> > I naturally want to see a fairly complete solution that is  
> > extensible to new data elements and additional languages.
> Looking at SAC 37 and your note, I wonder what the use cases are.
>
> SAC37 seems to (somewhat) conflate storage of data (see p8, "store  
> contact information in XML"), data formats used on the wire between  
> different systems, and display of information.
> The obvious set of requirements would seem to be:
>
> - extensible data model
> - serializable into some sort of XML format that can be used by  
> automated agents
> - play nicely with whatever EPP uses for whois data
> - play nicely with data models in current r'y and r'ar agreements
> - play nicely with IRIS, if that's still relevant (yet another ad- 
> hoc address format...)
> - some protocol (HTTP/XML binding?) that could take the place of  
> public WHOIS, while adding a machine-readable interface
> - (almost) arbitrary subsets of the data must be expressible (tiered  
> access in g's, should it ever happen, and also "specific ccTLDs'  
> needs")
> > When I think about where the locus of expertise for this sort of  
> > thing might be, it seems to me more likely to be in W3C than  
> > anywhere else.  Does this resonate?
> A few thoughts.
>
> It strikes me as fairly straight-forward to take the relevant pieces  
> from IRIS for the registration specific information (or, for that  
> matter, the relevant pieces from EPP, and cast them into a new  
> format).  It appears like much of the complexity is in
> - wrapping one's mind around the protocol requirements (most of  
> which will boil down to "use utf-8 already")
> - wrapping one's mind around having several representations of the  
> same registration data, but in different languages (with appropriate  
> tagging, etc)
> - using a format for civic address information that's reasonably  
> functional around the globe.
> In fact, the last piece of that task description is probably the  
> most complex one.
> I wonder whether the group has considered how much work could be  
> reused from the IETF's vcard related efforts?
>  http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/vcarddav-charter.html
>  http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardrev-09.txt
>  http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-vcarddav-vcardxml-01.txt
>
> Also, without having looked into the details, the geopriv Working  
> Group has spent time on civic address formats, perhaps also worth a  
> look.
>  http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/geopriv-charter.html
>
> About using W3C as a forum: Yes, the "design a format for this  
> information with a lot of attention to internationalization" task  
> does resonate.  One important question would be how to fund the  
> staff effort that we'd need to expend; let me know if you want to  
> explore this further.
> Thanks,
> --
> Thomas Roessler, W3C  <tlr@xxxxxx>