draft NOC/role object proposal

Dear all,

We have the creation of NOC/role object as one of the action points for
the RIPE NCC. However, after consulting numerous people we seemed to have
agreed upon something where we don't have any specification for ;-(.
Therefore, I am now doing a proposal for how the object could look like.
Note that this proposal is a real draft due to my personal ignorance of
your real needs in this area and the time that went by when we last
discussed the contents of this object for the last time...


Problem description:

We see more and more person objects in the database that are apparently
not persons but referrals to help desks or ISP NOCs. The problem with the
usage of person objects for this matter is that the person object isn't
really designed for this and that in certain cases we require certain
objects to point to real persons for accountability reasons. Usage of
non-persons in person objects undermines therefore the usability of the
RIPE database. However, it is quite obvious that there is a need for such
an object, especially for larger organizations.


Proposal:  
  

Since the object will be derived from the 'person:' object I will only
describe *all* the differences between the 'person:' object and the
'role:' object.


Attributes that are not used:


person:     - for obvious reasons
nic-hdl:    - a NIC handle is by definition assigned to persons and not
              to organizations. Since we don't expect too many people
              using this object it seems reasonable that we don't use a
              number as a unique identifier. If we will need it in the
              future we can add it.


Additional attributes:

role:       - the name of the object itself

admin-c:    - as in 'mntner' objects
tech-c:     - as in 'mntner' objects
              
              We could decide to leave the 'tech-c:' out, since what's
              the point in having a technical contact for a
              administrative object only anyway ?


How to reference the 'role:' object from an object:


Here we can opt for two different solutions:

1) We can allow people to use the 'role:' object in tech-c/zone-c
   attributes (not in admin-c, this one can only point to a human due to
   our current assignment criteria)
  
2) Use a special attribute. The attribute will be an optional, single
   line attribute for all objects that currently have an
   'admin-c:/tech-c:/zone-c:' attribute defined (including the role/NOC
   object if desired. Note that this can cause undesired loops...):

   Example:
  
   preferred-contact:
  
   Please advise on better and shorter names, but that makes clear that
   it is intended that a customer first checks with NOC/role object
   people.


How does the lookup work:

The RIPE database can be configured for objects that have references to
other objects in such a way that it will also show the referenced objects
when querying an object with referenced other objects. Since the NOC
object itself can have references to persons/roles, it seems best to do
such a recursive lookup only one level deep whenever we find a NOC/person
object referenced.

Examples:

$ whois 193/8

  inetnum: 193.0.0.0
  admin-c: DK13-RIPE
  tech-c:  RIPE-NOC
  [...]

  person: David Kessens
  nic-hdl: DK13-RIPE
  [...]

  role: RIPE-NOC
  tech-c: DK58
  [...]

and 

$ whois RIPE-NOC

  role: RIPE-NOC
  tech-c: DK58
  [...]

  person: Daniel Karrenberg
  nic-hdl: DK58
  [...]
  

We hope that this draft is useful enough for you all to let us define a
sound proposal for the NOC/role object. Please make as many
amendments/added features as you want and that you think is needed for
the object,

Kind regards,

David Kessens
RIPE NCC