Re: XML, etc

["Henning G. Schulzrinne" <hgs at cs.columbia.edu>]

Bob Braden wrote:
> 
>   *>
>   *> The other thing that would be nice is a way of getting all of the
>   *> authors current contact info in one place and up to date.
>   *>
>   *> -MM
>   *>
> 
> If you have a good idea on how to keep contact information
> up to date, the RFC Editor would like to know.
> 

While perfection is unachievable (after all, eventually all contact
information will be out of date as the authors move on to a different
addressing space), I believe we can do somewhat better than today. There
used to be a handle system that assigned unique identifiers to people. A
separate database (call it "whois" or "LDAP" or whatever) then tracks
the current location. If you want to get fancy, have a ping mechanism
that sends email to each author periodically (once a year, say), as that
at least increases the chance of catching somebody as their old address
is still reachable.

(FWIW, I do something similar for conference paper management in EDAS,
where authors and reviewers get assigned a unique and random 32-bit
identifier. They keep the identifier even as their contact information
or even name changes.)


-- 
Henning Schulzrinne   http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs