[ apologies for potentially replying out of synch, I haven't read to the end of my mail yet... ]

2 comments: . format: unless we add an (issuing) country indication, the string in itself might not mean anything I agree. My intention in suggesting this attribute is to make it possible to establish a shared key with external registries of Organisations. Thus part of the attribute should be some element the external reference in question.

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. verification / use: who is supoosed to do what with this piece of information?

Today netname in the inetnum object is used to determine if an organisation previously has received address space. In the future I belive this semantics should be moved to the organisation object.

And, depending on what we want to do with this info, is it "help-yourself", or is the NCC expected to do any sort of verification?

In my thinking, eventualy yes.

If the latter, what would the cost vs. benefit of doing so be?

Ensuring unique registration of real world organisations in the database, and lowering the cost of keeping track of the actual organisation using address space. In saying this I probably support Joaos suggestion: this attribute requires some more study and work before beeing implemented. To the extreme the attribute could be made mandatory for countries having such a system, with verification of uniqueness in creating the object in the database. ie identifying if the number is allready in use in the database - verify that the organisation is actually in existence. Yes - probably needs more thinking. Hans Petter

Wilfried. ______________________________________________________________________

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From the feedback we've got, it looks like we want another attribute in the organisation object, in which users can put an "organisation number" or an "organisation-id". This can be a VAT number, or a number assigned by a certain Chamber of Commerce, or any kind of other ID.

We would propose calling it "business-id:". We have thought of "org-id:" but the org-ID is the string we will have in "organisation:" attribute, so calling another attribute "org-id:" would be confusing. "national-id:" would have been another idea, but some IDs might not be a national one, like an ID assigned uniquely in the EU.

So the proposal is to add

business-id: [optional] [multiple]

as a new attribute. It is optional, as an organisation might not have such an ID. It is multiple, because an organisation might have multiple such IDs.

Thanks and best regards, -- Engin Gunduz RIPE NCC Database Group

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