Titley, Nigel wrote:

Does the RIPE NCC have a view On provision of objects haiku? Are you bored and depressed And in need of a rest? Is this just too much extra to do?

I think that I shall never see, A class as lovely as a tree. Trees like ash and bitternut, May be only made by God but, Objects are made by fools like me. [ With apologies to Alfred Joyce Kilmer ] Anyway, we are certainly willing to implement any feature that the community thinks is necessary, including but not limited to new classes, attributes, access methods, etc. Having said that, we have some problems with the current limerick class. First, we are having trouble coming up with a good way to detect whether limerick contents match the rhyming scheme. We can implement this, although we will probably limit it to English (even though there are Dutch, French, German, and other limericks), and will have to make it a warning rather than an error, to allow for artistic leave (to help people who think that "serenaders" rhyme with "join us", like in LIM-NT13-1). Second, it is difficult for us to enforce the requirement that the poem is humorous. I tried various algorithms, but none of the software I came up with seemed to find any of the limericks funny at all. Actually, I thought my computer was angry enough to swear at me, until I remembered that I had tried Perl, and the punctuation symbols were just the program itself. Anyway, I find the haiku an interesting proposal, but I do like the generality of the poem proposal. I also agree that limiting the types of poems to a pre-defined set of types. Therefore I suggest we use the database to self-document the types of poems using a meta-poem object. So poems would look like this: poem: [mandatory] [single] [primary/look-up key] descr: [optional] [multiple] [ ] form: [mandatory] [single] [inverse key] text: [mandatory] [multiple] [ ] admin-c: [mandatory] [multiple] [inverse key] author: [mandatory] [multiple] [inverse key] remarks: [optional] [multiple] [ ] notify: [optional] [multiple] [inverse key] mnt-by: [mandatory] [multiple] [inverse key] changed: [mandatory] [multiple] [ ] source: [mandatory] [single] [ ] The "form:" attribute will reference a poetic-form object: poetic-form: [mandatory] [single] [primary/look-up key] descr: [optional] [multiple] [ ] admin-c: [mandatory] [multiple] [inverse key] tech-c: [mandatory] [multiple] [inverse key] remarks: [optional] [multiple] [ ] notify: [optional] [multiple] [inverse key] mnt-by: [mandatory] [multiple] [inverse key] changed: [mandatory] [multiple] [ ] source: [mandatory] [single] [ ] The "descr:", "admin-c:", "tech-c:", "remarks:", "notify:", "mnt-by:", "changed:", and "source:" attributes are required in all RPSL objects according to RFC 2622. Initially we would have: poetic-form: VERSE-LIMERICK desr: A limerick object represents a humorous poem that has five lines and the rhyme scheme "aabba". admin-c: LIM1-RIPE tech-c: LIM1-RIPE mnt-by: RIPE-DBM-MNT changed: ripe-dbm@ripe.net 20040401 source: RIPE poetic-form: VERSE-HAIKU descr: A haiku object represents a poem that usually has three lines with 5, 7 and 5 units. In languages other than Japanese units are generally applied as syllables. There is no rhyme scheme at all. admin-c: HIKU1-RIPE tech-c: HIKU1-RIPE mnt-by: RIPE-DBM-MNT changed: ripe-dbm@ripe.net 20040401 source: RIPE We would restrict new poetic-form objects to creation by RIPE DBM, but adding additional forms for sonnets, free verse, blank verse, and so on, should be easy. If the community feels that identifying and documenting poetic forms falls out of the scope of the RIPE NCC activities, we can consider an alternative mechanism. Perhaps ICANN would be able to perform this activity? In any case, we would need a conversion project to change the existing limerick objects into poem objects. There are currently 152 of these, so we need to be careful not to interfere with these in a way that affect the production services that depend on them. FYI, the easy way to see all limericks to date is to get: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/ripe.db.limerick.gz An alternative path may be to consider encouraging haiku fans to author poems that also qualify as limericks: http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk/poetry/interstichia/haiku.htm -- Shane Kerr RIPE NCC