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

[Dave Piscitello <dave.piscitello@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks, Steve,

Sounds like Thomas' assessment is reasonably consistent with our initial
analysis of how other delivery methods (Postal, anecdotal info from ccTLDs,
RIR's RWS) had handled this issue.

I think that some of the requirements are outside the committee (and covered
in the work Steve Sheng and I are doing on a Whois service requirements
analysis for the GNSO) but a subset of his list is relevant. In my opinion,
the subset includes:

- 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
- some protocol (HTTP/XML binding?) that could take the place of public
WHOIS, while adding a machine-readable interface

On 12/21/09 5:59 PM  Dec 21, 2009, "Steve Crocker" <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> 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>
>> 
>> 
>