22 April 2024 16:13 - Klaus Lüttich

Owned by Klaus Vilstrup
Last updated: May 13, 2024
2 min read

Subject: Some genreral remarks on CIWG

Dear participants of CIWG

On the last meeting of CIWG B Craig Smith proposed to decide on the following meeting of CIWG B which of the proposed solutions should be evaluated by some proof-of-concept very soon. I think that we should first assess the business requirements for the end-user lookup scheme that Peppol needs in the future.

While the current draft document "Data and Service Sovereignty" addresses some important requirements for meta-data of end-users for AS4-addressing and business cards as basis for the Peppol directory, it does not address any requirement regarding the end-user lookup scheme.

So allow me to briefly explain the current capability lookup process for end-user meta-data: based on an unique identifier of the end-user a hostname is calculated which points within the DNS towards the IP-Address of the SMP that hosts the meta-data of that specific end-user. So, the SML only stores the unique hostname based on the end-users id together with the IP-address of the SMP which publishes the meta-data of the end-user. And the SML puts this data into the DNS.

Some of the limitations we are facing is that one particular DNS-zone should not grow beyond a specific number of entries (lookup an replication is than slower) and that a lookup from the APAC-region in a western-European DNS-zone is slower than in a APAC-region located zone.

But before we decide any new lookup model to be evaluated we should gather the business requirements that the end-user lookup scheme should meet.

One very important requirement for the German Peppol authority would be the following:
We want to keep the principle of connecting once and reaching every end-user who wants to receive Peppol-business-documents. So, we will need some architecture to find the meta-data to reach any individual end-user.

Therefore, we need to define rules which ensure uniqueness of a logical identifier of the end-user, which can be as easily shared as an e-mail-address.

Within group CIWG C we should discuss and gather such business requirements thoroughly which address the purpose of an architecture or systems similar to the current SML logic.

Best Regards, Klaus

Dr. Klaus Lüttich
Principal Consultant
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Governikus GmbH & Co. KG
Hochschulring 4
28359 Bremen, Germany