Re: The museum and heritage sectors

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Tue, 26 Nov 1996, Cary Karp wrote:

> The Postel memo raised the hope of all this changing. If the
> museum sector were to end up among those that had its own
> iTLD, notions of guessable and memorable domain designations
> might be realized. 

> operators to go to any great lengths to cater to our needs. We
> would certainly perceive no benefit to being tucked into some
> general purpose domain such as the draft-iahc-higgs .ARTS
> ("Education; providing of training;sporting and cultural activities.")

This is one of the reasons why the IAHC has to deal with the question of
iTLD's in which all registrations are at the third level. I have suggested
that there should be a .ALT TLD in which all registrations are at the
third level and second levels are created as needed and are all managed
and served up by the .ALT authority. I have suggested that there should be
a .MARCA TLD in which all second levels (and perhaps deeper levels)
correspond to unique trademark categories or jurisdictions. Again, the
second levels would be run by the .MARCA authority and would not be
delegated.

However this would still not handle the museum situation and similar ones.
So I think there needs to be a .CAT TLD (from category) that holds only
second level domains that are delegated to mini-registries who use those 
domains only to register third level domains. Thus the museum could get
together and agree on an SLD .MUS.CAT or .MUSEUM.CAT and then set up a
registry which they run themselves for their own members and associates.

I would like to see TLD's such as .MARCA, .ALT and .CAT either created by
IAHC or held in reserve by them until such time as an organization can be
formed to support this public naming resource. In other words I believe
that these TLD's should be given special treatment since they will be run
on a not-for-profit basis and thus it is unlikely that an applicant can
come forward with a business plan and infrastructure map prior to the
creation of such TLD's. At this point I can only see one organization that
could handle such a task (ISOC) however it is possible that there are
other organizations that would contribute the resources to do this.

> Better still, might be for us to put in a bid for the
> delegation of authority to operate our own domain. 

I will note that creating a few TLD's in which second level registries can
operate will reduce the pressure to create thousands of iTLD's like the
one suggested in the above sentence.

      .MUSEA.CAT for museums
      .LIBER.CAT for libraries
      .ARKIV.CAT for archives
      .SITES.CAT for monuments and sites

> If it is, would it be advisable for us to write a proposal
> stating the heritage community's interests in this process prior
> to the Dec 1st deadline?

I'd love to see input into the process from this sector even if I am 
presupposing a solution up above. The more viewpoints that can be examined
by the committee the better the solution will be.

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com