Carlos Martinez, CTO of LacNIC presented on RDAP. His slide pack (in Spanish) from the LACNIC 24 meeting is a nice overview of the active collaboration at the technical level, in both standards development and code development and deployment of this critical new technology.
WHOIS is one of the oldest protocols in routine use on the network, and well overdue for structured data service replacement. RDAP is a JSON based representation of registration data, which is a common framework across both DNS name space WHOIS data, and the RIR Internet Number Resources space.
Given some fractures in the data representation in WHOIS (at least three different formats are being presented across the NRO system, with more in the namespace WHOIS) its really good we’ve got to a common goal in this new protocol. APNIC’s service is visible and available online at http://rdap.apnic.net/ip/2401:2000:6660::/48 (an example of an IPv6 lookup). This code entered production service in May of this year.
Carlos is right to showcase this to the community as an example of what the NRO/RIR nexus can achieve when it works together. In particular, the key deliverable which is going to make RDAP work for the wider community is the support of international alphabet textual data, which finally permits people to maintain basic contact and address information in their own language.
We can also point to a good collaboration between the NRO and IANA with the creation of the IANA bootstrap data registry pointing down into the RDAP services for each allocated block. Finally, we have a comprehensive, coordinated global data access method.
While this is confusing for remote viewers, given the centrality of access by local ISPs, LEA and other agencies, having the data fully represented in the local language with no substituted or missing characters improves the data quality massively.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.