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Identifier Technologies Health Indicators (ITHI) Frequently Asked Questions

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WHAT IS ITHI?

ITHI, or Identifier Technologies Health Indicators, is an ICANN initiative to measure the "health" of the identifier system that ICANN helps coordinate. The goal is to produce a set of indicators that will be measured and tracked over time that can be used to determine if the system of identifiers is overall doing better or worse. This is a long-term project, expected to run for a number of years.

WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THE ITHI PROJECT?

The scope of ITHI is all the Internet unique identifiers that ICANN helps coordinate.

WHAT IS THE TIMEFRAME FOR THE ITHI PROJECT?

The kick-off of the ITHI project took place during an open session at ICANN55 in Marrakech on 9 March 2016. The expectation is to work with the community iteratively to define relevant metrics and track them over a long period of time. The data collection is an ongoing activity of ICANN.

WHERE CAN I READ MORE ABOUT ITHI?

The Importance of ITHI to You, and How to Participate

What ITHI Can Tell Us About Resolver Concentration

HOW CAN I PARTICIPATE IN ITHI?

Please contact us at ithi-info@icann.org and a member of our team will be in touch with you shortly.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."