Name lookup service

[YangWoo Ko <newcat@spsoft.co.kr>]

Dear all,

Here below, I attached Korean keyword working group's view on name lookup.
We can give you brief review on our document during BoF if necessary.

With my very best regards

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Requirements for Name Lookup Service - Draft
                                                                                                                                   MINC-KR Meeting 
                                                   July 16, 2001

0. Abstract

There have been many efforts to support various needs on "domain name 
services" - IDN, Directory, CNRP, for examples. This document discusses 
the requirements for supporting "name lookup services", that is, finding 
Internet objects or resources using keywords or common names.  The name 
lookup service is regarded as an alternative to DNS [2] in which it 
satisfies various users' needs that DNS cannot.  

1. Executive Summary
 
Internet has been expanding rapidly. Current DNS has played very important 
role in this expansion. In spite of the convenience of DNS, there are 
still needs to identify the Internet object by common name instead of 
address or long domain name. There are many proposals for this purpose. 
Name lookup system is also one of those approaches. In this document, 
the equirements for name lookup service are presented.  

2. Introduction

Internet address has been evolved in a way that users can use it 
conveniently. The IP address is the first implementation of the Internet 
address. Raw numbers are used to represent subnets and hosts in which 
they are separated by dots. The DNS and IDN replaced the numbers of the 
IP address with character strings in which they are more easily 
identifiable by users. 

Despite the convenience of DNS and IDN, there are still needs to identify 
or "lookup" the Internet object by "name". The names include domain names, 
common names such as personal names and business names, for examples. A 
context dependent name identifies uniquely only one Internet resource. 
Name lookup service returns just one result for one query.

CNRP and directory system were also developed to support various needs 
on domain names. However, they are NOT regarded as a name lookup service 
because they are designed to return multiple returns for one input.  
 
Any device which can be attached to the Internet can be used for an input 
and output device for the name lookup service.

3 List of Service Requirements

3.1 Return 0 or 1 result

Since the name lookup service is based on the lookup repository that 
is defined in [1], the result to a successful lookup is a single group 
of information. That lookup repository contains many types of address 
information. The group of information, the result of the lookup operation, 
includes IP address, domain name, URL, e-mail address and so on. It needs 
more discussion about which attributes should be included. It also needs 
more discussion whether the result is one specific attribute or multiple 
attributes of the target Internet object.  

3.2 Input is a word or a phrase

One of the main purposes of the name lookup services is to allow users 
to use more intuitive and familiar names. In this sense, the services 
should permit the use of phrases as well as the words. These names can 
be in all languages. Further discussion includes the maximum words in 
a phrase, the length of a phrase, whether permitting special characters 
(i.e., slash, comma, blank space, parenthesis, and so on) as part of 
the input.  

3.3 No explicit attribute

Users provide only the naming attribute of the object that they want to 
find. No other attributes of the object are required explicitly from 
users. Instead, the implicit use of attributes of the name is permitted 
for the sake of efficiency and flexibility. This will be discussed in 
Section 3.4.

3.4 User profile may be provided (optional)

As mentioned in Section 3.2, some attributes are used to efficiently 
handle the name lookup services. For instance, the following attributes 
could be used in user's profile.  

* The language 
* The locality (or preference location) 
* The name lookup service provider 
 
In addition to the attributes listed above, the current location of 
mobile terminal might be an important attribute in mobile Internet 
environments. Consequently, the name lookup services can provide a 
context-sensitive service that can enhance user's convenience. Moreover 
the name lookup services can enlarge the limitation of the DNS naming 
space by using context-sensitive naming scheme. 

3.5 Auto completion (optional)

In order to reduce the query error by typing incorrect names, the service 
can complete the full names by matching them partially even before 
finishing typing while users type names.

3.6 Optional link to keyword search

The keyword search [3], CNRP[5] and Directory systems [6] are different 
from the name lookup service in that the former three schemes return 0 
or more results while the last one returns 0 or 1 result. The keyword 
search can be effectively used with the name lookup in cases that the 
name lookup fails to find the name or user wants to see different results.

3.7 List of applications

Service should be designed independent of any applications so that any 
application can use this name lookup service if it wants to do.  
 
3.8 Input

The name lookup service allows such inputs as business names, brand names, 
personal names, telephone numbers, or even barcodes. It should include as 
many forms as possible for the input.

4. References

[1] H. Alvestrand, "Definitions for talking about directories", 
draft-alvestrand-directory-defs-02.txt, IETF, April 2001 
[2] P.V., Mockapetris, "Domain names - concepts and facilities", 
RFC 1034, IETF, November 1987 
[3] John C. Klensin, "A Search-based access model for the DNS", 
draft-klensin-dns-search-00.txt, IETF, May 2001 
[4] Paul Hoffman, Marc Blanchet, "Preparation of Internationalized Host 
Names", draft-ietf-idn-nameprep-03.txt, IETF, February 2001 
[5 ] N. Popp, M. Mealling, M.Moseley, "Common Name Resolution Protocol", 
draft-ietf-cnrp-10, IETF, June 2001.  
[6] J. Sermersheim, "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)", 
draft-ietf-ldapbis-protocol-01.txt, IETF, Feb 2001.

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