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ICANN Open Data Initiative

The goal for Open Data Initiative (ODI) is comprehensive access to raw data for the ICANN community. The main deliverables for ODI are an open data platform for the ICANN community to use and the processes and support in place to help the ICANN organization share data to this platform.

To ensure free and unfettered access to both the organization and the community, we will enhance access to data. All data that can be published should be published. Procedures and processes will ensure that the organization will be responsible to the community served by ICANN org. Access to data will be strengthened in the coming procedures and processes, methods to engage the community will be enhanced, and standards for higher data usability and reuse will be introduced.

We will build trust in published data, both within the ICANN community and the ICANN org. The success of ODI hinges on our ability to safeguard data from misuse and rigorously protect the public's right to privacy. Privacy will not be considered as an afterthought, but at the beginning of all discussions concerning the release of a new dataset.

Open data in this context means specifically tabular data – that is, data that would normally be stored in a spreadsheet, data file, or database. It does not refer to documents or other free-form information.

Achieving this means implementing a specialized open data publishing platform, which allows anyone to find, search, and download data in a variety of ways, supporting as many open standards as possible. Then behind the scenes, there will be a new system that publishes data to that platform, having first redacted or masked any confidential or sensitive data.

Achieving the goals of ODI requires a shift in the culture of the ICANN org – from protecting data and concentrating on internal use to making open data the default. There is nothing easy about opening data and making it freely accessible to the ICANN community, but the outcome is worth the effort. A major part of the work of ODI will be to provide the support that ICANN org staff needs to deliver this outcome successfully.

As the framework is developed, milestones and progress will be documented on this page.

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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."