3. Who should publish IWPS information and how?

IWPS information is public address information regarding individuals and organizations. The IWPS information concerning an individual should be published and maintained by an organization that has a direct, durable link with this individual, like in the following cases:

• The individual is employed by the maintainer's organization
• The individual is enrolled in the university/school that maintains the data
• The individual is a (personal) subscriber of the maintainer's Internet service

The organization that maintains the data does not have to store the data in a local database of its own. Though running a local database in the X.500 or Whois++ service is not a too difficult job, it is recommended that Internet service providers provide database facilities for those organizations among its customers that only maintain a small part of the IWPS information or don't have enough system management resources. This will encourage such organizations to join the IWPS. Collection of IWPS information and keeping it up- to-date should always be in the hands of the organization the information relates to.

Within the current (national) naming schemes for X.500, entries of individuals reside under an organization. In the case of Internet service providers that hold the entries of their subscribers this would mean that individuals can only be found if one knows the name of the service provider. The problem of this restriction could be solved by using a more topographical approach in the X.500 naming scheme, but will more likely be solved by a future index service for directory services, which will allow searches for individuals without organization names (see section 12).