Dear community,
George Michaelson ggm@apnic.net wrote:
APNIC Secretariat has an opportunity to update our systems to support
use of the geofeed: field in inetnum and inet6num Whois objects. We
are interested in understanding community support for this work.
I would like to express support for adding the optional single
'geofeed:' attribute to the RPSL attribute dictionary of inetnum and
inet6num objects. The server-sided RPSL parser should confirm whether
the value of the 'geofeed:' attribute is a syntactically correctly
formatted URI. The server should not fetch/parse the Geofeeds object
itself.
Considering APNIC's IRR database follows a robust authorization and
authentication model, the data one can extract from a Geofeeds file
referenced in APNIC hosted inetnum/inet6num objects is of increased
quality and value.
Another advantage of referencing Geofeeds file is how it offers a clean
separation between prefix length boundaries, relevant in BGP routing,
and prefix length boundaries relevant for organizing IP addresses into
geographical regions. Attempts to conflate these two aspects into a
single database always appeared to have introduced some friction,
however with the Geofeeds concept I am optimistic the community has a
real chance at fixing long-standing issues in this context.
Another reason to support the 'geofeed:' attribute is that the concept
already today can be used by overloading 'remarks:', this means RPSL
database operators can't stop users from publishing Geofeeds data
referenced via RPSL, but they certainly are in a position to make it
easier and more robust for everyone.
Kind regards,
Job