rfc2148.txt

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Network Working Group                                   H. Alvestrand
Request for Comments: 2148                                    UNINETT
BCP: 15                                                       P. Jurg
Category: Best Current Practice                               SURFnet
                                                       September 1997


             Deployment of the Internet White Pages Service

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
   Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

1.  Summary and recommendations

   This document makes the following recommendations for organizations
   on the Internet:

     (1)   An organization SHOULD publish public E-mail addresses and
           other public address information about Internet users
           within their site.

     (2)   Most countries have laws concerning publication of
           information about persons. Above and beyond these, the
           organization SHOULD follow the recommendations of [1].

     (3)   The currently preferable way for publishing the information
           is by using X.500 as its data structure and naming scheme
           (defined in [4] and discussed in [3], but some countries
           use a refinement nationally, like [15] for the US). The
           organization MAY additionally publish it using additional
           data structures such as whois++.

     (4)   The organization SHOULD make the published information
           available to LDAP clients, by allowing LDAP servers access
           to their data".

     (5)   The organization SHOULD NOT attempt to charge for simple
           access to the data.

   In addition, it makes the following recommendations for various and
   sundry other parties:

     (1)   E-mail vendors SHOULD include LDAP lookup functionality
           into their products, either as built-in functionality or by
           providing translation facilities.



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     (2)   Internet Service providers SHOULD help smaller
           organizations follow this recommendation, either by providing
           services for hosting their data, by helping them find other
           parties to do so, or by helping them bring their own service
           on-line.

     (3)   All interested parties SHOULD make sure there exists a core
           X.500 name space in the world, and that all names in this
           name space are resolvable. (National name spaces may
           elobarate on the core name space).

   The rest of this document is justification and details for this
   recommendation.

   The words "SHOULD", "MUST" and "MAY", when written in UPPER CASE,
   have the meaning defined in RFC 2119 [17]

2.  Introduction

   The Internet is used for information exchange and communication
   between its users. It can only be effective as such if users are able
   to find each other's addresses. Therefore the Internet benefits from
   an adequate White Pages Service, i.e., a directory service offering
   (Internet) address information related to people and organizations.

   This document describes the way in which the Internet White Pages
   Service (from now on abbreviated as IWPS) is best exploited using
   today's experience, today's protocols, today's products and today's
   procedures.

   Experience [2] has shown that a White Pages Service based on self-
   registration of users or on centralized servers tends to gather data
   in a haphazard fashion, and, moreover, collects data that ages
   rapidly and is not kept up to date.

   The most vital attempts to establish the IWPS are based on models
   with distributed (local) databases each holding a manageable part of
   the IWPS information. Such a part mostly consists of all relevant
   IWPS information from within a particular organization or from within
   an Internet service provider and its users. On top of the databases
   there is a directory services protocol that connects them and
   provides user access. Today X.500 is the most popular directory
   services protocol on the Internet, connecting the address information
   of about 1,5 million individuals and 3,000 organizations. Whois++ is
   the second popular protocol. X.500 and Whois++ may also be used to
   interconnect other information than only IWPS information, but here
   we only discuss the IWPS features.




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   Note: there are other, not interconnected, address databases on the
   Internet that are also very popular for storing address information
   about people. "Ph" is a popular protocol for use with a stand-alone
   database.  There are over 300 registered Ph databases on the
   Internet. Interconnection of databases however, is highly recommended
   for an IWPS, since it ensures that data can be found. Hence Ph as it
   is now is not considered to be a good candidate for an IWPS, but
   future developments may change this situation (see section 12).

   Currently X.500 must be recommended as the directory services
   protocol to be used for the IWPS. However, future technology may make
   it possible to use other protocols as well or instead.

   Since many people think that X.500 on the Internet will be replaced
   by other protocols in the near future, it should be mentioned here
   that currently LDAP is seen as the surviving component of today's
   implementations and the main access protocol for tomorrow's directory
   services. As soon as new technology (that will probably use LDAP)
   becomes available and experiments show that they work, this document
   will be updated.

   A summary of X.500 products can be found in [14] (a document that
   will be updated regularly).

   The sections 3-7 below contain recommendations related to the
   publication of information in the IWPS that are independent of a
   directory services protocol. The sections 8-11 discuss X.500 specific
   issues. In section 12 some future developments are discussed as they
   can be foreseen at the time of writing this document.

3.  Who should publish IWPS information and how?

   IWPS information is public address information regarding individuals
   and organizations. The IWPS information concerning an individual
   should be published and maintained by an organization that has a
   direct, durable link with this individual, like in the following
   cases:

   -    The individual is employed by the maintainer's organization

   -    The individual is enrolled in the university/school that
        maintains the data

   -    The individual is a (personal) subscriber of the maintainer's
        Internet service






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   The organization that maintains the data does not have to store the
   data in a local database of its own. Though running a local database
   in the X.500 or Whois++ service is not a too difficult job, it is
   recommended that Internet service providers provide database
   facilities for those organizations among its customers that only
   maintain a small part of the IWPS information or don't have enough
   system management resources. This will encourage such organizations
   to join the IWPS. Collection of IWPS information and keeping it up-
   to-date should always be in the hands of the organization the
   information relates to.

   Within the current (national) naming schemes for X.500, entries of
   individuals reside under an organization. In the case of Internet
   service providers that hold the entries of their subscribers this
   would mean that individuals can only be found if one knows the name
   of the service provider.  The problem of this restriction could be
   solved by using a more topographical approach in the X.500 naming
   scheme, but will more likely be solved by a future index service for
   directory services, which will allow searches for individuals without
   organization names (see section 12).

4.  What kind of information should be published?

   The information to be published about an individual should at least
   include:

   -    The individual's name

   -    The individual's e-mail address, in RFC-822 format; if not
        present, some other contact information is to be included

   -    Some indication of the individual's relationship with the
        maintainer

   When X.500 is used as directory services protocol the last
   requirement may be fulfilled by using the "organizationalStatus"
   attribute (see [3]) or by adding a special organizational unit to the
   local X.500 name space that reflects the relation (like ou=students
   or ou=employees).

   Additionally some other public address information about individuals
   may be included in the IWPS:

       -    The individual's phone number

       -    The individual's fax number

       -    The individual's postal address



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       -    The URL of the individual's home page on the Web

   In the near future it will be a good idea to also store public key
   information.

   More information about a recommended Internet White Pages Schema is
   found in The Internet White Pages Schema [16]

   Organizations should publish the following information about
   themselves in the IWPS:

    -    The URL of the organizations home page on the Web

    -    Postal address

    -    Fax numbers

    -    Internet domain

    -    Various names and abbreviations for the organization that
         people can be expected to search for, such as the English
         name, and often the domain name of an organization.

   Organizations may also publish phone numbers and a presentation of
   themselves.

5.  Data management

   Data management, i.e. collecting the IWPS information and keeping it
   up-to-date, is a task that must not be underestimated for larger
   organizations. The following recommendations can be made with respect
   to these issues:

   -    An organization should achieve an executive level commitment
        to start a local database with IWPS information. This will
        make it much easier to get cooperation from people within the
        organization that are to be involved in setting up a
        Directory Service.

   -    An organization should decide on the kind of information the
        database should contain and how it should be structured. It
        should follow the Internet recommendations for structuring
        the information. Besides the criteria in the previous
        section, [3] and [4] should be followed if X.500 is used as
        directory services protocol.






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