[db-wg] last-modified:, a succesor to changed:

Dear DB Working Group,

Assessing the "freshness" of database objects can be a useful component
in many business processes, but as it stands today the "changed:"
attribute is severely crippled:

Eleanor:~ job$ whois -h whois.ripe.net AS15562 | grep changed
Eleanor:~ job$ whois -h whois.radb.net AS15562 | grep changed
changed:        unread at ripe.net 20000101
Eleanor:~ job$

Fantastic! Now we are absolutely none the wiser. :-)

I propose that we introduce a new attribute called "last-modified" as a
replacement for functionality offered by past implementations of
"changed:".

The "last-modified" attribute is set by the whois server software and
represents the date and time at which the last succesful modification
was received by the server. When a user submits an update for an object
in which the attribute is present, the server software will ignore the
attribute, insert its own attribute with the current time, and present a
warning to the user that the user's version of "last-modified" was
ignored. The "last-modified" attribute should be presented by the server
software in all types of objects (autnums, poems, etc) for which the
server is responsible (e.g. do not touch foreign or mirrored objects). 

The date and time are represented following the ISO 8601 [1] profile for
complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds, always expressed in UTC,
including the special UTC designator 'Z'. The "last-modified" attribute
should be presented above, but close to the "source:" attribute. 

The advantage is that the date and time are both human readable and
computer parsable!

A valid example "last-modified" attribute would be:

    last-modified: 2014-04-15T13:15:30Z

I look forward to the group's feedback! Also, I'm interested in how
people would use this attribute in their workflows or automation. 

Kind regards,

Job

[1] - https://xkcd.com/1179/