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