[TSG-Access-RD] Bulk Data, Bulk Query, WhoWas and Charter scope

[Andrew Newton]

As part of today's charter discussion, a couple of concepts were
brought forward with respect to RDAP as practiced with Whois.

o Bulk Data (Bulk Whois) - the ability to obtain a large number of
registrations, if not all registrations. For example, several RIRs
make available their entire registration set and this is often
referred to as Bulk Whois, though in general it does not use the Whois
protocol.

o Bulk Query - the ability to submit many queries at one time, and
obtain the answers to those queries. In practice, this is accomplished
today with clients issuing single queries to obtain the desired data
set.

o WhoWas - a service which provides historical registration data. The
term "WhoWas" is a play on the "Whois" name. Today, some of the RIRs
provide this service though not using the Whois protocol.

In my opinion, providing Bulk Data using RDAP is possible with an
extension that falls within the bounds of RFC 7480 (some of us in the
numbers community have discussed it informally). That said, I do not
think bulk data or bulk whois should fall within the scope of this
group.

It is also my opinion that supporting bulk queries in a means other
than the current practice would require an extension to RDAP that
would be "unnatural". I do not believe bulk queries should fall within
the scope of this group.

Finally, WhoWas can be accomplished with an RDAP extension (APNIC has
such a prototype available and it if very neat). But again, I do not
believe WhoWas should fall within the scope of this group.

-andy