Re: United Nations

[Russ Wright <[e-mail]>]

I don't think this message was sent to osi-ds (just to the quipu list), but
I think some of you may be interested in commenting.

Russ

>Via: uk.ac.salford.europa; Fri, 18 Nov 1994 08:59:27 +0000
>From: [e-mail]
>Date: 17 Nov 94 24:39
>To: [e-mail]
>Subject: Re: United Nations
>Encoding: 53 TEXT
>Status: RO
>
>Date: Wed, 16 Nov 1994 18:18:17 -0500 (EST)
>From: Malcolm Chapman <[e-mail]>
>To: [e-mail]
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>
>We are in the process of establishing X.500 services for the different
>agencies that comprise the United Nations System. Due to the international
>nature of the organization, we are faced with the problem of the 'Country'.
>
>As far as we can see, the best solution would be to add a new top level
>'country' denomination such as 'UN', under which we could develop each one
>of the Agency trees.
>
>We would appreciate any comments on this issue, and any advise you may
>give us as to how to proceed.
>
>Regards - Malcolm Chapman
>_______________________________________________________________________________
>Malcolm G. Chapman                             Phone:  [phone]
>United Nations Development Programme           Fax:    [phone]
>Div. for Admin. & Information Services         E-mail: [e-mail]
>
>Malcolm,
>
>people are correct in telling you to use organisation name rather than country
>name. As yet there is not a good ISO/ITU standard for registation of
>multinational organisation names, although the ITU-T are working on this and
>have already produced a draft (at the ISO meeting in July 1994, ISO agreed that
>they now wanted to collaborate with ITU on this standard - about 6 years
>too late in my opinion). At the current time, organisations have been
>contacting BSI to register under ISO 6523 (registration of International Code
>Designators for Organisations), but the problem with this standard is that it
>allocates you a unique number (ICD) - which organisations then use for object
>identifiers - and a string, but the string is not guaranteed to be unique.
>However, of the 60 or so registrants to date ( e.g.  DoD, WHO, Digital and
>Shell to name but a few) I do not believe that there are any clashes.  Way back
>in 1988 I suggested that this standard should be updated so as to allocated
>unique strings as well as numbers, but this was turned down (I believe that one
>of the reasons was because BSI did not want the administrative hassle of
>administrating it). So today, we are left with the situation that multinational
>organisations choose their own names, in the hope that there will not be any
>clashes before an official registration scheme is formulated.
>
>You should be pretty safe with 'United Nations'. I do not know of any other
>organisation with that name!
>
>David