[arabic-vip] WHOIS related query

[Manal Ismail]

Dear Steve, this is very useful indeed .. personally I believe, for Arabic, we're talking about variants in the order of 10s .. but I stand to be corrected ..
 
Dear Sarmad, I believe it's important that we reference work done by other WGs that we see useful from an Arabic script point of view and try to build on what has already been achieved ..
 
Kind Reagrds
 
--Manal
 

________________________________

From: arabic-vip-bounces at icann.org on behalf of Steve Sheng
Sent: Tue 16/08/2011 09:15 PM
To: Sarmad Hussain; baher.esmat
Cc: arabic-vip at icann.org
Subject: Re: [arabic-vip] WHOIS related query


Hi Sarmad, 

  Since I have been doing a lot of WHOIS work, I can chime in here or find people who can answer your questions. 

  Your question is about when a label goes into dispute, does its WHOIS information change? 

  I guess that depends on what is meant by dispute. In some registries/registrars, when they found out domain name has a problem (not paid, or engaged in some malicious activities), usually they put a EPP hold status. This operation  allows the registry to take the label in question out of zone file for investigation. This status is also reflected in the WHOIS output. In this case, the consideration is if the domain in dispute have delegated variants, should those be put on hold status as well? 

Later on, if the registry/registrar choose to cancel the domain, the label would be deleted from the WHOIS database completely. 

For your information, the query and display of variant in WHOIS has been discussed in the IRD-WG's (Internationalised Registration Data Working Group) interim report, and here is what they come up: (see Section 4.2 Query And Display Variants in Internationalised Registration Data of http://gnso.icann.org/issues/ird/ird-wg-final-report-15nov10-en.pdf) 



*	There is no uniform definition of variant. Different organizations and different countries define it differently. However, in general, variants can be categorized as activated variants and reserved variants. Activated variants are variants of a domain name that are put in the corresponding DNS zone file, thus resolvable through normal DNS lookups. Reserved variants are variants reserved for a specific domain name and cannot be registered, but are otherwise not in the DNS zone file. 
*	IRD-WG members noted that it is outside the scope of the IRD-WG to define variants or discuss how different languages handle variants. Rather, the IRD-WG use the categories as they are generallly defined (activated vs. reserved). 
*	The IRD-WG members agree that a Whois service query of an activated variant should return the domain of which it is a variant in its response, as well as an indication that the label queried is a variant of the original domain. The IRD-WG members agree that this should be consistent across Whois services. 
*	The IRD-WG members also agree that defining a Whois service query of a reserved variant returns is a matter of local policy. The IRD-WG has identified two options: A query of a reserved variant for XYZ domain should return a message saying that this variant is a reserved variant of XYZ domain or (alternatively) a query of a reserved variant should return the same information as the query for an activated variant. The WG further agreed that having the Whois service response provide a link to the registrar/registries' variant policy would be helpful.
	



A useful feedback from the Arabic community would be whether the approach above makes sense? When the IRD-WG discusses this issue, there were no Arabic experts, so we don't know what the Arabic experience is.  Perhaps it is useful for the team to articulate these requirements.  From a technical stand point, this discussion perhaps highlight the need for a better data model/schema for whois data, putting all those variants in the whois output in an unstructured way is not good for user experience. 

Another question is a stupid question from me, how many variants could an Arabic label have? Is it in the order of 10s, 100s or 1000s we are talking about? This have obvious implications for WHOIS output and registry WHOIS services.  

Let me know if the Arabic team has any additional questions on this. 

Steve

On 8/16/11 9:32 PM, "Sarmad Hussain" <sarmad.hussain at kics.edu.pk> wrote:



	Dear Baher,
	 
	As per our discussion today, could you find out from relevant person from ICANN on the following:
	 
	1.       When a label goes into dispute, does its WHOIS information change (e.g. indicating it is in dispute)?
	
	 
	Regards,
	Sarmad
	 
	----
	???? ???? 
	 
	Sarmad Hussain 
	Professor and Head
	Center for Language Engineering (www.cle.org.pk)
	Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science (www.kics.edu.pk)
	University of Engineering and Technology (www.uet.edu.pk)
	Lahore, PAKISTAN