Dear Cynthia, Thank you for sharing these observations. You are correct that the new reg-nr: attribute is intended to publish company registration numbers for legal entities. For resource holders identified as natural persons (including sole traders) or as public organisations, the attribute is set to “Not Applicable”. It’s also worth noting that the underlying registration data has been collected by the RIPE NCC over around two decades, often through manual processes. As part of introducing this new attribute, we carried out an extensive review of around 40,000 resource holder records and a number of corrections and reclassifications were made during this process. A key priority in this review was to ensure that no personal data of natural persons is published. It’s reassuring to read that you have not encountered such cases. Public organisations can sometimes be more difficult to classify consistently. In some countries they do have some formal registration number and from the organisation name alone it is not always clear whether an entity should be treated as public or not. This means there may still be edge cases or inconsistencies, and your example is helpful in highlighting that. If you (or others) come across other entries that appear incorrect or inconsistent, please send them directly to ripe-dbm@ripe.net so we can review and, where necessary, update them. This feedback loop will help us further improve the overall quality and consistency of the data. Thank you again for taking the time to look into this and for contributing to improving the RIPE Database. Kind regards Marco Schmidt Manager Registration Services RIPE NCC On 03/05/2026 13:00, Cynthia Revström via db-wg wrote:
Hi db-wg and ncc-services-wg,
I'm not sure if this necessarily belongs in db-wg or ncc-services-wg but I felt like it might be of interest to both.
Now that the reg-nr fields have been populated I have noticed some interesting places where it is present and where it is omitted.
As far as I understand it, it is supposed to be omitted from orgs referring to natural persons (I assume including sole proprietors) and government agencies while being included for basically all other kinds of entities.
When looking at the data for some Swedish entities I noticed that for both non-profit associations and government agencies, there were those with reg-nr and those without. I would expect non-profits to have reg-nr (except for the cases when they don't have one) while I would expect gov agencies not to have one.
One example of a gov agency having reg-nr is SUNET, the Swedish NREN: ORG-SA58-RIPE As SUNET is also the employer of one of the current RIPE NCC EB members I would expect that the NCC would be somewhat familiar with the fact that it is a gov agency.
I highlighted that I was worried about this kind of issue when we discussed this proposal in the db-wg in November so I can't say that I'm too surprised.
I am however thankful that I at least haven't observed any cases of a natural person having a reg-nr on them as that was my biggest worry by far.
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