[db-wg] proposal: new attribute 'geofeed:'

Purely as a point of information, Randy also asked for APNIC to
consider this field, and it has been put into the Opportunity process
inside Registry Product, of which I am the manager.

I am following this discussion. My primary concerns are the effects on
tools, of a new type:value assertion appearing in the RPSL. If this is
not a high barrier to deployment it has consequences beyond geofeed:
marker for us.

Separately, I think in order to ensure RDAP and Whois stay in
alignment, some thought needs to be given to how this value projects
into JSON in RDAP records.

And, lastly, I would like this field, because it would relieve some of
the tension around the country: marker in inetnum and inet6num and the
economycode field of the delegated statistics file, which is by
definition about the entity, not the addresses. Widespread acceptance
of a geofeed mark would allow registry to return to a normative use of
the economycode for the domicile of the holding entity.

cheers

-George

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 2:28 AM Job Snijders via db-wg <db-wg at ripe.net> wrote:
>
> Dear DB-WG,
>
> Some colleagues are working to address the never-ending-story of 'where
> the heck are IPs geographically?'. This problem space has been brought
> up numerous times in the Database Working Group, but we never managed to
> solve it. As with all compsci problems adding a layer of indirection can
> help ;-)
>
> This current draft suggests overloading the RPSL 'remarks:' field with a
> structured attribute value, however I suspect we would do ourselves a
> disservice to overload a 'remarks:' field.
>
> Instead it would be better to add a 'geofeed:' attribute to the RPSL
> inetnum/inetnum6 class dictionary, which as value contains a URL with
> http or https scheme.
>
> The draft: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ymbk-opsawg-finding-geofeeds
>
> The value of the attribute could be validated using something like
> "org.apache.commons.validator.UrlValidator", the attribute would look
> like this, only valid in the inetnum/inet6num:
>
>     "geofeed:   [optional]   [single]     [ ]"
>
> Example object:
>
>     inetnum:        192.0.2.0 - 192.0.2.255
>     netname:        EXAMPLE
>     country:        NL
>     geofeed:        https://example.com/geofeed.csv
>     ... snip ...
>     source:         RIPE
>
> What do others think?
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Job
>
> ps. In IRRd v4.2 support for the 'geofeed:' attribute will be added
> https://github.com/irrdnet/irrd/issues/396
>