Well, my personal preference would be to: a) make the country attribute optional and discourage its use at the same time, and b) allow something like ZZ (in case it isn't already) if an organisation wants to keep this attriute but doesn't want to, or cannot (reasonably), indicate the country "relevance". For any reasonable definition of country relevance, that is ;-) Wilfried. Christian 'wiwi' Wittenhorst wrote:
Dear DB-WG,
might there be a consent for introducing "ZZ" as an allowed value for the "country"-attribute for "unspecified"?
Reasoning:
- ISO 3166-1 [1] specifies "ZZ" as "User-assigned code elements are codes at the disposal of users who need to add further names of countries, territories, or other geographical entities to their in-house application of ISO 3166-1, and the ISO 3166/MA will never use these codes in the updating process of the standard.".
- Many current entries do not specify the correct/meaningful value for country. Examples includes: [2a] RIPE-NCC-K-ROOT: NL [2b] TELTEK-1: GB, but: country is really Europe and Middle East [2c] ORG-AFNC1-RIPE: EU, but: country is really somewhere in African Region [2d] IANA-BBLK-RESERVED1: EU, but RFC1918 network [2e] EU-ZZ-163: EU, but: Country is really world wide [2f] LUXLINK-003: DE, but: These IP's are really World-Wide
- For automated statistics it would be nice to have a special designation for IPs which do not correspond to a specific location, so that they are easy to filter.
- It could be used for (global) anycast services, too.
- ARIN & AfriNIC legacy entries could get a "correct" country.
- Documentation says: "There are no rules defined for this attribute.", but the attribute is mandatory? Shouldn't we change that? Either make the attribute optional or specify, what it is supposed to contain.
- I am dreaming: Wouldn't it be <http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&p=5tY9AA&search=desirable>desirable to have a designation for "world", too?
- We already have a least on strange countries "EU", which does not seem to be part of ISO 3166-1...
I'd like to hear your opinion...
Best regards,
Christian
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1> [2a] <http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=193.0.14.129&object_type=inetnum> [2b] <http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=193.9.152.0&object_type=inetnum> [2c] <http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=193.189.128.0&object_type=inetnum> [2d] <http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=172.16.0.0&object_type=inetnum> [2e] <http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=163.0.0.0&object_type=inetnum> [2f] <http://www.db.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=91.142.59.0&object_type=inetnum>