Unique NIC/RIPE/xxx-Handles

Dear DB-folks,

during the IETF we (Daniel K, Ruediger V and me) had a short ad-hoc meeting
and identified some aspects of the RIPE-DB business that should be addressed
and discussed.

One of them, and quite urgently needed is to agree on structure and procedures
to obtain unique handles for people who do not (yet) have NIC handles.

One of the ideas we talked about was to go to a structure like

  NIC-XY999	(derived from the current NIC-Handles by prepending NIC-)
  RIPE-XY999	(newly assigned within the RIPE community)

Reudiger even thought about adding even more structure like
RIPE-Provider_ID-XY999, or RIPE-XY999-Provider_specific...
The issue here is whether we want to have the Provider_ID as part of the
hierarchy tree. 
My personal preference is the RIPE-XY999[-optional-Provider_specific...]
format, the handle being unique without the Provider part.

Another question is where and how to register/assign these handles. One
possibility could be to have this as a service from and at the NCC, say
assigned by some script. A Different approach would be to assign them somehow
at the Local-IRs.

Could you please comment on these? I'd like to have some form of consensus
ready for approval at the next RIPE meeting.

Best regards,
Wilfried.