Editor's Note:  These minutes have not been edited.


RIDE BOF Meeting Minutes (Thursday 4/10/97 900-1130am)
Reported by Dhaval Shah
 
The meeting started of with David Kessens describing the motivation for
RIDE and a presentation that covered the proposed charter including the
schedule for the goals and milestones.

Rick Wesson followed with a brief presentation on the Internet draft that
describes the various RIDE classes. Some people felt a bit uneasy about
the fact that the classes were represented by using a C++ representation
during the presentation. It was clarified that the draft itself didn't
use this representation. A question was asked if the representation in
the draft could be more clear on required, optional and/or single valued
fields. It was explained that this was planned for the next version of
the draft.

David now explained the relation of RIDE to COREdb since it was felt that
there were some common issues that needed to be worked out. We had a
lively discussion and decided that we should strictly focus on the data,
dataformats and protocols to be used for exchanging data between IP,
domain and routing registries. It was felt that the RIDE standard could
and should be used by the COREdb if we took this approach. The RIDE
standard would automatically cover COREdb since it is just a particular
instance of a domain registry.

The next agenda topic was NIC handles and how to deal with them. David
did a strawman proposal to define a NIC handle as the second level domain
of the .NET gTLD with certain information stored in an associated TXT
record to be able to find the associated information. Another idea was to
let IANA assign the suffixes or maintain a 'registries.int' domain that
would store the possible suffixes. The discussion that followed made
clear that we were in fact trying to solve references and NIC handles at
the same time while we should in fact take a step back and look at
references in general and NIC handles were just a specific case. We
decided to address references in the charter of the working group and be
more explicit in our boundary conditions like that we are looking for the
best solution that can work with the current registry technology since we
assume that to be fixed and to a large extent unchangable.

Then, Masaya Nakayama held a short presentation on the whois servers that
are currently in use by 17 Internet registries. He found that 4
registries were using the InterNIC formats, 7 the RIPE format and 6 their
own private format. Also, 7 servers had support for local languages which
made it clear that we cannot easily ignore multiple language support.

In order to start the work on the dataformats and protocols, we had a
short discussion on how to choose or design a protocol and format to
exchange the actual data. It was felt that we should choose an existing
technology if possible.
 
Finally, it was proposed that David would become the chair of the working
group. David asked if Dhaval Shah could become a co-chair in order to
share the workload a bit. The working group agreed to this.

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