Colleagues I would like to propose a new NWI about contact references in the RIPE Database. Something that has needed to be cleaned up for a very long time. I have written a draft Problem Statement and Solution Definition below. Your comments are appreciated.
cheers denis co-chair DB-WG Problem Statement The RIPE Database only uses inheritance for references to abuse contacts. The admin, tech and zone contacts all use local direct references in every resource object. This has resulted in millions of unnecessary, repetitive, redundant references throughout the database. This can make the data difficult to manage and keep up to date if any referenced contact is replaced. A common problem was referencing a PERSON object in thousands of resource objects. When that person leaves the company it requires a mass data update. Adding inheritance to all contact attributes allows for a cleanup and removal of massive amounts of redundant data references. There are millions of assignments to end users with contact references pointing back to the resource holders contacts. It is confusing to have unnecessary, repeated contact references in these assignments. This would simplify the basic structure of the database. I see this simplification as a first step towards removing unnecessary personal data from the database. Solution Definition I would like to suggest adding inheritance to the other three contacts for admin, tech and zone. The only syntactical changes needed are to make "admin-c:", "tech-c:" and "zone-c:" 'optional' in INET(6)NUM, AUT-NUM and DOMAIN objects and add "zone-c:" as an optional attribute in the ORGANISATION object. At the time of implementation nothing needs to be changed. Next time an ORGANISATION object is updated it needs to have a default "admin-c:", "tech-c:" and "zone-c:" added (if it doesn't already have them) if it is a resource holders object (ie if it has an "abuse-c" attribute). Creating new resource objects, eg assignments, or receiving new allocations, won't need to have these contact attributes included if they are the same as a parent object or the default values in the ORGANISATION object. A standard query for a resource object will return the object as it is, including any optional contact attributes contained within that object. Three new query flags, '--admin', '--tech' and '--zone' added to a query for a resource object will return the correct hierarchical contacts for that resource. The RIPE NCC can provide tools for doing cleanups of resource hierarchies to remove redundant contact attributes with an option to list specific objects that should keep their local values.
