Affiliations List (AffiL)

Membership can matter: Affiliations List (AffiL) provides a method for determining whether an individual, authenticated domain name has a particular affiliation. Many different types of affiliation lists are possible. They can declare ownership by the publisher, some sort of permission by the publisher, membership in a group, and so on. Examples include:

• An an industry organization such as one for financial institutions or airlines might wish to publish a list of its members.
• A single organization might control many domain names that appear to be unrelated and might be scattered across several branches of the domain name hierarchy.
• An organization that authors mail, and has its domain name in the RFC5321.From field, might wish to provide an explicit list of the organizations that are authorized to send mail on its behalf and with its domain name in the From: field

Domain names can be used as the core identifier in an assessment process, such as when filtering incoming email. One type of assessment is to note that the name is used by a person, role or organization having a particular affiliation, such as being part of a well-known company or being part of a salient industry association. Such a list is distinct from qualitative assessment lists, such as for email reputation. It provides a means by which the list owner can describe the list, but the specification does not indicate what affiliations exist or should be consulted. The specification uses Vouch By Reference (VBR) as its query mechanism.

Presentations

For background about ANL, please see:

• Introduction to AffiL (formerly: PML)  »  pdf, ppt

Deployment

We will maintain a list of AffiL Implementations and Uses.

Specification

The affil-discuss mailing list is the open venue for pursuing enhancements to the ANL specification.

(revised: 28 April 2009)