[dbwg] parent org idea

[ginny listman]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 william at elan.net wrote:

>   I've had an idea for a while that it could be usefull for ARIN to allow 
> one organization id to specify a "parent" organization id. 
>   Basicly there are many instances I find where one organization has 
> multiple ARIN organization ids (sometimes even a dozen or more!) and it is 
> getting rather difficult to trace this all. Some companies end up with 
> multiple ids because of mergers, some do this on purpose, but in general 
> it would be good idea to be able to determine with certainty that this is 
> the same company and for large companies it may also be usefull to be able
> to add their offices in different cities/regions (which often act almost 
> independent) or subsidiaries under their own org allowing local people 
> there to manage aspects of ip information and administration (as far as 
> ARIN whois, swips, etc) but still allowing one overall main account with 
> ARIN.
>   The database change here would be very simple - add "parent orgid" field
> organization table. There would probably also needs to be some whois changes
> to allow ">" query to show child organizations. But overall I don't think
> technically this is that difficult.
>  What do you all think of this idea?
> 
> BTW - 
> I'm brining this up now in part because ARIN has decided to link 
> "ReferralServer" field to orgnization table and this would mean that 
> organizations must decide to either have rwhois server for all their 
> netblocks or none. By setting up system as described above, an 
> organization that wished to maintain rwhois server for some ip blocks 
> and not for others can setup separate orgid with different referral-server
> settings.
> 
> 

We agree that the parent org is a good idea. In fact, back in December 
2000, we put this concept into our schema, and it still exists today. Our 
intention was to introduce this ability in the future.  Although this 
functionality has not been a high priority for the Engineering staff at 
this point in time, we still intend to further explore this sometime in 
the future.

Ginny Listman
Director of Engineering
ARIN