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iNAME project of APTLD and APNG

The Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Forum (APTLD), previously initiated and incubated through APNG, now an independent organisation, together with APNG iDNS Working Group, has initiated a project on Internationalized (or Multi Language) Name Working Group with the following initial members will start its activities from October 1998 onwards.

APNG Chairman's commission on iDNS system and the iDomain will interface with and work in close collaboration with the iNAME project of APTLD/APNG.

Draft Aims and Charter of the iNAME Working Group
To be revised

Mailing List

iname@aptld.org

Chairman

Professor Kilnam Chon (Interim)

Members

Australia - clive/au
China - hlqian/cn
Korea - kilnamchon/kr
Niue - bsemich/nu
Papua New Guinea - noel mobiha/pg
Singapore - tinwee/sg
Thailand - kanchana/th
Taiwan - wu/tw
iDNS mailing list - idns-list@idns.org, idns@apng.org

Brief Introduction

DNS currently supports only ASCII code, and does not support the 8-bit code, nor 2-byte codes. This working group plans to study and implement/demonstrate various approaches to support non-ASCII codes to faciliate various languages commonly used in Asia-Pacific. The Internationalized Naming (iNAME) of APTLD will be the first working group to address to support non-ASCII characters in domain names. We also form the subworking group, iDNS to coordinate iDNS experiment led by NUS (Dr. Tan Tin Wee and his group) with APNG.

There are two major approaches;

  • Internationalized DNS
  • Keyword(s) Search

    The first approach based on iDNS promoted by NUS is being deployed in several countries in Asia now. See http://www.apng.org/idns, or contact Dr. Tan Tin Wee and his group at CIR of NUS for further information. This project has been organised as an iDNS working group in APNG. It has an international mailing list, and is in the process of going through the IETF standardisation process via its mailing list idns-list@idns.org.

    The second approach is based on the keyword(s) search with translation. This approach is being used in ASCII code as well as non-ASCII codes. For example, Microsoft and Netscape among others are working hard on this approach now. In Korea, there are several systems for Korean language now.

    We are interested in both (and possibly other) approaches, and iNAME working group will work closely with iDNS working group.

    by Kilnam Chon
    Updated by Tan Tin Wee (3 Aug 1999)

    Draft iDNS Issues to be handled by iNAME
    contributed by Martin J. Duerst (duerst@w3.org)
    and Tan Tin Wee (tinwee@pobox.org.sg)
    • Name Convention Issues
      • Language-specific "country code" TLD conventions
      • Language-specific gTLD conventions if any
    • Trademark Issues
      • Trademark problems for iDNS which are similar as for ASCII DNS. (i.e. where we don't complicate matters, and can ideally take over solutions)
      • Trademark problems get easier with iDNS (e.g. several companies have the same name when written in Latin letters, but are clearly differentiated with ideographs)
      • Trademark problems are interrelated with potential structures of i18n domains (e.g. as long as iDNS is restricted to country domains, things may be much easier than if iDNS is applied to .com).
    • Language-specific Dispute resolution process and WIPO
    • Liaison and Representation at DNSO and ICANN

    iNAME Working Group Chairman: Professor Kilnam Chon (interim)
    APTLD Coordinator for iName and other APTLD projects: Dr Wu Kuo-Wei, NCHC, Taiwan.
    iDNS is being coordinated by Dr. Tan Tin Wee for APNG and APTLD now.

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