Dear Piotr

We are not suggesting anything, certainly not abandoning whois. What we are trying to do is start to raise questions. This database design/model is 15 years old. We can say for sure it is not efficient, relationships are not good, there is massive duplication of data. But does it still do what people want? Could it be (much) better? Could we provide alternative ways to interface with it (and keeping the old ways)? Could we provide better features and services? Can we make your daily/regular tasks with the database easier and quicker and less error prone?

There are many people within the community who have 'grown up' with this database and RPSL. They understand it, know how to use it, have work arounds for it's limitations, have lots of software that integrates with it. But so many new users struggle to do all these things. We see the same problems on training courses. We see the same questions being asked so many times in support tickets. We hear the same issues being raised in the background at meetings.

We know these are big issues and nothing is going to be fixed/improved in one single step. But there is a big knowledge/usability gap between long term/experienced users and new users. In general many of the experienced users don't appreciate the way new users struggle with the complexity of the RIPE Database. So we are trying to raise awareness of this and find a way to move forward.

Regards
Denis Walker
Business Analyst
RIPE NCC Database Team
On 08/05/2014 11:57, Piotr Strzyzewski wrote:
On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 12:52:59PM +0200, Denis Walker wrote:

Dear Denis


I find this suggestion clumsy. It adds hard to parse extraneous 
information to simple objects. The organization object for a very large 
organization would become unmanageable and unintelligible quickly.

Who do you believe is going to parse this object for this information? The 

Users. ;-)


RIPE NCC already has an Abuse Finder tool which can be accessed directly or

RIPE NCC already has two Abuse Contact Finders, which already misleads
the users. :| And yes, I know that one of them will be obsoleted.


via RIPEstat. As I said in the last paragraph of my article, people should 
start to move away from the old fashioned idea of digging directly into the 
RIPE Database themselves to find data, parse it and interpret it. If you 
need information the RIPE NCC will provide web tools and API calls to 
supply that information. We will  do all the digging, parsing and 
interpretation for you.

And sadly speaking, what I understand here, between the lines, is let's
abandon whois in some point of time. I hope I misunderstood you.

Piotr