12. Future developments

Today [October 1996] there are several enhancements to be expected with respect to IWPS technology.

The most important one to be mentioned here is the creation of a "Common Indexing Protocol" that must enable the integration of X.500, Whois++ and protocols that use stand-alone databases. Such a protocol would not only enable integration but would offer at the same time the possibility to explore yellow pages services and enhanced searches, even if used for X.500 only.

In the context of the Common Indexing Protocol the stand-alone LDAP servers should be mentioned that are announced by several software developers. These are stand-alone address databases that can be accessed by LDAP. Currently also a public domain version is available from the University of Michigan. Also announced is an LDAP-to-DAP gateway that can integrate a stand-alone LDAP server in an X.500 infrastructure.

Other improvements include defining a common core schema for multiple White Pages services, leading to the possibility of accessing data in multiple services through a single access protocol.

The 1993 version of the X.500 standard has already been implemented in several products. It is an enhancement over the 1988 standard in several ways, but has not been implemented in the NameFLOW-Paradise infrastructure yet. The main reason is that the standard doesn't recognize the existence of a single root DSA, but assumes that the managers of first-level DSAs (the country DSA's) make bilateral contracts for interconnection. In the case of NameFLOW-Paradise such a situation would be unmanageable. In [13] an enhancement of the 1993 standard is proposed that makes a single root possible. As soon as implementations of [13] are available, NameFLOW-Paradise will experiment with 1993 DSAs. This is expected in 1997.

Once these developments reach stability, they may be referenced by later versions of this BCP document.