Hello all, Below you can find the announcement from the IESG on the formation of the IETF Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service (WEIRDS) Working Group. The aim of the working group is to work on a unified whois request-and-response format based on the web technologies. If you find the subject interesting, please kindly participate in discussions using the pointers in the original announcement. The RIPE NCC will do its best to make sure requirements and current practices of our community are reflected in the discussions but your direct participation is really appreciated. Kind regards, Kaveh. --- Kaveh Ranjbar, RIPE NCC Database Group Manager Begin forwarded message:

From: IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary@ietf.org> Subject: [weirds] WG Action: Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service (weirds) Date: May 15, 2012 6:58:40 PM GMT+02:00 To: IETF Announcement List <ietf-announce@ietf.org> Cc: weirds@ietf.org

A new IETF working group has been formed in the Applications Area. For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs.

Web Extensible Internet Registration Data Service (weirds) ---------------------------------------------------------- Status: Proposed Working Group Last updated: 2012-04-24

Chairs: Olaf Kolkman <olaf@nlnetlabs.nl> Murray Kucherawy <msk@cloudmark.com>

Applications Area Directors: Barry Leiba<barryleiba@computer.org> Pete Resnick<presnick@qualcomm.com>

Applications Area Advisor: Pete Resnick<presnick@qualcomm.com>

Mailing List: Address: weirds@ietf.org To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/weirds/

Description of Working Group:

Internet registries for both number resources and names have historically maintained a lookup service to permit public access to some portion of the registry database. Most registries offer the service via WHOIS (RFC 3912), with additional services being offered via world wide web pages, bulk downloads, and other services, such as RPSL (RFC 2622).

WHOIS has never been internationalized. In the absence of formal specification, ad hoc solutions to signal internationalized registration data have been adopted and deployed. Providing a standards-based solution that scales well could minimize further proliferation of ad hoc solutions.

WHOIS also has no data model: replies are basically just free-form text. This means that processing of WHOIS output amounts to "screen scraping", with specialized handlers for every service. While many of the domain name registries share a basic common output format, the addition of data elements changes the output and causes problems for parsers of the data.

The WHOIS protocol does not offer any differential service; it cannot differentiate among clients to offer different subsets of information or to allow different access rates to it.

Various attempts to solve the limitations of WHOIS have met with mixed success. The most recent of these was IRIS (RFC 3891). IRIS has not been a successful replacement for WHOIS. The primary technical reason for this appears to be the complexity of IRIS, the fact that it builds upon many available technologies that in the aggregate form a complex system. There may also exist non-technical reasons, but they lie in areas upon which the IETF does not pass judgement.

In recent years, ARIN and RIPE NCC have fielded production RESTful web services to serve WHOIS data, and each has met with success. It is widely believed that this simpler re-use of Web technologies familiar to modern web developers has enabled this success. The purpose of this working group is to broaden the use of RESTful web services by achieving simple and common URI patterns and responses amenable to all number resource and domain name registries.

This Working Group shall determine the general needs of such a service, and standardize a single data framework. That framework shall be used to encapsulate objects that could form part of an answer. The framework shall be for data to be delivered via a RESTful data service using HTTP (optionally using TLS), and may use standard features of HTTP to support differential service levels to different classes of user. The data shall have one mandatory format, though the working group may consider other optional formats. The overall effort will be broadly aligned with a subset of the Cross Registry Internet Service Protocol (CRISP) Requirements (RFC 3707), but with the explicit additional goals of producing a simple, easy-to-implement protocol, supporting internationalized registration data and, specifically for name registries, capturing the needs of internationalized domain names in the data model.

As the number registries have more experience with these services and have found common ground, with their dissimilarities resulting in more complete working group input documents, the goals of the working group are to produce standards-track specifications for both number and name registries using the fashion and pattern of the number registry input documents, draft-newton-et-al-weirds-rir-query and draft-newton-et-al-weirds-rir-json-response, as an initial basis.

Work to specify the query for domain name registration data will be based on draft-sheng-weirds-icann-rws-dnrd.

The Working Group shall determine the general requirements of such a service, using draft-kucherawy-weirds-requirements as an input document, and standardize a single data framework. The working group will likely not seek publication of this draft.

Should the Working Group reach a point where it determines that the problem of producing a grand unified specification for both numbers and names appears to be intractable, it will be permitted to divide the problem into separate tasks and amend its milestones accordingly.

Milestones:

Nov 2012 Draft specifying the common infrastructure document to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Feb 2013 Draft specifying the RESTful URL query format for RIRs to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Mar 2013 Draft specifying the format for responses to RIR queries to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Jul 2013 Draft specifying the RESTful URL query format for domain name registration data to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard.

Aug 2013 Draft(s) specifying the format(s) for responses to domain name registration data queries to the IESG for approval as a Proposed Standard. _______________________________________________ weirds mailing list weirds@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds