[Rt4-whois] SSAC recommendations regarding terminology

[Smith, Bill]

Fabulous summary! (especially the Hamming bits)


On Oct 3, 2011, at 3:42 PM, "Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet" <Woeber at CC.UniVie.ac.at> wrote:

> 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
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