Modules

NUM was published in September 2020 with ten proposed modules. Our goal is to enable anyone to propose a module and create one. In the meantime, to contribute to any of the modules listed or propose a new one please contact us.

1. Contacts

Contact information on the internet is unstructured and inconsistent. Finding contact information on an organisation's website consumes considerable amounts of time, data, and often requires significant user interaction. Contact information provided by search engines and social media platforms is neither open nor authoritative and is often incomplete and inaccurate.

The Contacts module can be used to store contact data for a person, group, organisation, department, employee, location or folder. Data can be stored hierarchically allowing organisations to store contact information for each of their locations, departments and employees.

Branch records can be used to navigate complex contact information, providing structured machine readable data to help navigate a call centre or support teams.

2. Registrant

The Registrant module can be used to store ownership data for a domain name, email address or any asset represented by a domain name. It's focus is on the legal entity name, type and address.

It does not include any other contact information. Contact information should be provided in the Contacts module.

View Technical Information

3. Images

The Images module can be used to store image data for a domain name or email address.

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4. Custodians

Many online service providers require users to verify that they have authority to claim or act on behalf of a domain name – e.g. Google's Search Console, Microsoft's Office 365 and more. The state of the art is to instruct users to create a specific record in their DNS (usually TXT or CNAME) for each service. This presents a significant barrier to most users and often results in the DNS being bloated by unnecessary records.

The Custodians module enables domain name administrators to list the people that have permission to act as a custodian for a domain name. Custodians are listed by hashed identifier (e.g. an email address), permissions are associated with each custodian.

Domain name registrars could automatically create a custodian record for the domain registrant once the domain is registered, this would automatically grant permission for the domain registrant to claim their domain name on supporting services.

View Technical Information

5. Register

The Register module is for numbers relating to governments and regulatory authorities. For example, company numbers, tax IDs, financial regulators, food standards regulators and more

6. Payments

The Payments module enables payment data to be stored for a domain name or email address. A wide variety of methods can be stored including international payment details, PayPal and cryptocurrency.

7. Public Key

The Public Key module enables public key storage related to a domain name or email address. An independent alternative to key servers.

8. Intellectual Property

The Intellectual Property module makes it possible to store patent and trademark numbers.

9. Terms

The Terms module is a simple way to provide links to terms and conditions for a company's products and services. Each set of terms must show a date of the last update, indicating when terms and conditions have changed.

10. Bugs

The Bugs module provides information about how to report bugs on websites and apps.

XX. Your module here?

Anyone can propose a new module. Have an idea for a new use case?