[Rt4-whois] SSAC recommendations regarding terminology

[Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet]

Emily Taylor wrote:
> Hi guys
> 
> Thanks for absorbing the SSAC document.  SSAC have made a conscious effort
> to include us in their draft-report loop in order to help us with our work,
> which is very good of them.
> 
> For the benefit of members of the team who may be sinking under the load of
> documents to be read, would you mind reproducing the terms that you think we
> should adopt (in the body of an e-mail),

Sure, here we go, although a bit belated, sorry.


In Section 2. Taxonomy of Trms, on page 5 of the SSAC document
	https://community.icann.org/display/whoisreviewprivate/SSAC+-+WHOIS+Advisory
the authors set out to introduce 3 terms and abbreviations, see below.
[For the full text please refer to the document]

<quote>
When one speaks about WHOIS, it is often unclear which part of the system he/she
is referring to. To avoid confusion, SSAC proposes the following terms to better
distinguish the components of the WHOIS system:
</quote>

	btw, this text c|should be copied verbatim to a prominent place in our
	document and/or referred to.

1) Domain Name Registration Data (DNRD) – refers to the information that registrants
   provide when registering a domain name and that registrars or registries collect.
   Some of this information is made available to the public. [...]

2) Domain Name Registration Data Access Protocol (DNRD-AP) – refers to the elements
   of a (standard) communications exchange – queries and responses - that make
   access to registration data possible. For example, the WHOIS protocol (RFC 3912)
   and HTTP (RFC 2616 and its updates) are commonly used to provide public access to DNRD.

3) Domain Name Registration Data Directory Service (DNRD-DS) – refers to the service(s)
   offered by registries and registrars to provide access to (potentially a subset of)
   the Domain Name Registration Data. [...]

> and any _brief_ reasoning which might assist comprehension.

I think adopting these 3 terms is fully in line with all the discussions and
interactions we had so far, and will help in making it obvious to the reader
which aspect we are talking about.

We may opt to be a tad sloppy and omit the "Domain Name" prefix, where it is
obvious from context (most of the time), but stick to the abbreviations

- DNRD    for the Registration Data itself,
- DNRD-AP for the Access Protocol, and
- DNRD-DS for the Directory Service.


In a subsequent section, SSAC develops some additional terms and abbreviations,
like
- DRNDe for "individual elements in DNRD",
- "internationalised" and "localised" DNRD and
- DNRD-DSD to denote a subset of DNRD that is made available by the DNRD-DS

While I do agree, there is technical merit in defining this stuff, I believe
that the Hamming Distance[1] is too small for the average reader to be useful.
If your head is spinning now with Ds, Rs, Ns and Ds - you are in good company :-)

Sticking to the 3 should be good enough!

> Much appreciated,

You are welcome!

> Emily

Hope this has been useful, cheers,
Wilfried.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance