Chadwick, David W.

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Kent Academic Repository

The Internet Directory is NOT Primarily a Technology IssuePosition Paper by D W ChadwickPositionThe main reasons why we do not yet have a fully operational Internet Directory service,whether it be based on X.500 or on Whois++ or on `this-great-new-protocol-that-I-have-just-invented' :-), are primarily managerial, administrative and legal, and are NOT technical.RationaleThis position is drawn from personal experience of working with directories over the lastdecade, as well as from recently published  research. The latter comprises a study conducted inthe UK by Paul Barker [1], and a series of X.500 case studies [2] conducted by myself overthe last couple of years.Building an integrated electronic directory service within an organisation requires a lot ofsenior management commitment - commitment to provide resources in terms of staff time,computer hardware and software, and commitment to coerce, cajole or force otherdepartments in an organisation to release `their' data for publication in someone else'selectronic directory service. Some managers get very possessive over `their' information. Sotop management support is often needed in order to get access to the data. Coupled to this isthe spectre of information confidentiality. It is sometimes argued that publication oforganisational telephone numbers and Email addresses in an electronic directory is breachingthe personal privacy of the employees. So this is another reason for not being able to gainaccess to the data for the directory. To quote one example, a research organisation inGermany did at one time have all its staff in an X.500 electronic directory connected to theInternet, but this had to be removed following a workers council decision that required theorganisation to obtain written permission from every employee before their details could beentered into the directory. The administrative hassle of this was seen to outweigh the benefits,and so the data was removed. Another example, quoted in [2], concerns a Scottish University,where senior managers would not release data from the personnel department for publicationin an X.500 directory, as it was seen to be breaching confidentiality. The decision waseventually reversed after several years of negotiation, but by this time the impetus to install thedirectory was lost.Once the necessary permissions are received to load the data into the directory, your datamanagement troubles are not over. On the contrary they could be just starting. Reference [2]found that many sites had data consistency problems. The master data sources such as the HRdatabase, the PABX and the Email address file were often found to be inconsistent, withnames spelt differently, initials and titles either missing or in reversed order, and some staffcompletely absent from one or other data source. It can literally take several man weeks ofeffort just to sort out the data inconsistencies, with manual intervention usually being the onlyeffective way. Most of the sites studied ignificantly  underestimated this problem. Reference[1] quotes an average time of 5-6 man weeks of effort,  with the  worst case taking 4 months.Finally software tools will have to be purchased or built, and procedures written, so that thedata can be frequently and automatically updated. For these reasons some sites studied in [1]chose to opt out from having an integrated directory service, and instead chose to haveseparate telephone and Email sequential files, containing different  sets of names.To summarise, it takes a lot of time, patience and resources to collect all of the necessaryinformation, load it into a directory, and keep it up to date, and so senior management supportis essential.Coupled with this we must realise that users have very stringent demands on the quality ofdata that is kept in an electronic directory. It must be 100% accurate, it must be current, and itmust be complete. Otherwise the directory will soon fall into disrepute. Accuracy refers toinformation such as names and addresses being correct, currency fers to data beingcontinually updated (at least daily for human consumption, much more frequently forcomputer based applications) and complete refers to the breadth of data that is stored.Contrast this with the Web which is enjoying phenomenal success at the current time, butwhich has few (if any) of these data quality requirements placed on it. When I query the Web,I might be very happy to find any information about topic z. It does not matter too much if aparticular document is 3 years old, I can still read it and gain valuable information from it. Nordoes it matter if I am unable to retrieve all the information there is about topic z, I may beperfectly happy to pick up less than 10% of the global published works. But considerapproaching the Web with a very specific query, for which there is only one correct answere.g. I want to find the population of Santa Monica, or I want to access an online copy of theMerchant of Venice, or what is the current price of product x, or what is the ISBN of`Understanding X.500'[3] etc. A Web user might find it very frustrating trying to track downthis sort of specific information in the Web. But these are precisely the sorts of queries that arelevelled at a directory service. I need to know the telephone number of Jo Davis in Digital,who works somewhere in the US, or what is the Email address of Thomas Wolchenizia at theUniversity of Prague. Surprise, surprise, most queries of this type when levelled against thecurrent Internet X.500 directory service fail, so users tend to discount the technology as notbeing up to job, when in fact the failure has nothing to do with the technology, and everythingto do with the management of the data within the directory. Management can choose preciselywhat information they publish in the Web, but with the directory they have much less freedomof choice. An Internet directory which does not hold communications related data is nodirectory at all.By contrast, there are a number of excellent well managed X.500 directory sites around theglobe that will always give you the data you require. For example, Salford University holds thenames of every undergraduate and postgraduate student and every member of staff in itsX.500 directory, and it is updated nightly. It holds telephone numbers, fax numbers and Emailaddresses. Other good quality data sites that I have queried in the past include NASA and theUniversity of Michigan. But these are few in number compared to those sites that do not havea good quality globally connected directory service. Why is this?Part of the reason is that being part of a global directory service is very difficult formanagement to justify in terms of a simple cost benefit analysis. The immediate cost ofimplementation is high, but the immediate benefit is seen to be comparatively low. Reference[1] found that approximately half the universities  in the UK were not prepared to countenancethis cost, and instead opted  for a simple local directory service that fulfilled the most pressingrequirements of their  local users, particularly local Email address lookup. One of its majorfindings was that a local directory service was seen to solve most of the directory serviceproblems of a site, so there was no desire to foot the extra cost of buying into a globaldirectory service. A few sites were not even prepared to fund the implementation of a localdirectory service. Even when a directory service is fully functioning and well utilised by staff,the number of daily directory queries can be orders of magnitude less than the number ofphone calls made, or the number of Email messages sent. Consequently an organisation canoperate without an electronic directory service, but it cannot operate without access to thetelephone, and increasingly, Email. Hence the reluctance, by some universities at least, toinvest their scarce resources in a `nice to have' part of the infrastructure. If the organisationhas lived without an electronic directory for the last 20 years, surely it can live without it forthe next year or two until the cost of implementation is reduced. The hidden costs of staff timewasted trying to find addressing information, are rarely taken into the cost benefit equation.Another reason concerns commercial confidentiality. Commercial organisations maysuccessfully implement an internal directory service, and they may even connect it to theInternet directory service, but they certainly will not make their information accessible to theglobal community. They are only interested in retrieving information from the directory, notcontributing to it. The spectre of confidentiality rears its frightening head once again. (It is notthe  purpose of this paper to embarrass those companies who have already done this usingX.500 technology, by listing their names in public, but if you want to know who they are, lookthem up in NameFLOW-Paradise. They are immediately identifiable as you are only be able toretrieve a stub entry giving the name, address and phone number of the corporateheadquarters. You wont find any staff details.) Again, this often leads to criticism of theunderlying technology, when in fact it is purely a result of a management decision.For an Internet directory service to be successful, a huge critical mass of data is required. Inmy experience users can tolerate poor network performance, if the chances of success are high(>90%), i.e. a user has a greater than 90% chance of finding person X in the Internetdirectory. The NameFLOW-Paradise service currently has approaching two million entries inX.500, but this is not seen to be sufficient to guarantee a reasonable chance of success. Thechances of finding the details of more than say 10% of the people at this conference in theNameFLOW-Paradise service are probably less than 50/50. So if I need to find YOUR details,where do I look? This situation is made more frustrating when one considers that we nowhave competing and incompatible directory technologies. This will inhibit the creation of acritical mass of users in any single directory. If we are to accept competing directorytechnologies on the Internet, then some form of gatewaying between them is absolutelyessential.In this position paper I hope to have persuaded you that many of the inhibitors to a globalInternet directory service are primarily managerial, administrative, and to a lesser extent legal,and are not as a result of poor or inappropriate technology. For these reasons, I do not thinkthat new protocol developments such as Whois++ will significantly affect the overall growthof an Internet directory service, unless it can significantly reduce the cost of entry (and giventhat Quipu was originally supplied free of  charge, this does not seem probable). However, theNomenclator pilot [4] might prove to be more successful, because this is attempting tointerconnect already existing CCSO databases containing directory information. Hence manyof the management, legal and administrative problems outlined in this position paper havealready been overcome.We all look forward to the day when we will be able to find each others’ details in the Internetdirectory service, whatever its underlying technology. Let’s hope that we will be able to dothat before we retire.References[1] Barker, P. “White Pages Directory Services in the UK Academic Community”, December1995, available by anonymous FTP from cs.ucl.ac.uk/dirpilot/wpds.ps  or http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccsap/Directory/Docs/x5usage/x5usage.html[2] Chadwick, D.W. “Important lessons derived from X.500 Case Studies”, IEEE Networks,March/April 1996[2] Chadwick, D.W. “Understanding X.500”, Chapman and Hall, July 1994, ISBN 0-412-43020-7[4] Nomenclator details vailable  from  http://www.cs.att.com/csrc/nomen/nomenclator.html

The Internet Directory is NOT Primarily a Technology Issue

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