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Label Generation Rules (LGR) Toolset

Work during the development of the Integrated Issues Report [PDF, 2.14 MB] identified the need of specifications for representing information and rules for determining valid labels and their variants in different scripts and a tool to make this data machine-readable.

ICANN is assisting in the development of a new machine-readable XML-based format to be used for organizing and representing the LGR data. The formal representation is captured in Representing Label Generation Rulesets using XML, which is work in progress.

IDN Program has also initiated the LGR Toolset project to develop a set of tools to create, use and manage LGRs based on the LGR specification. The tools are based on requirements finalized after public comments. The project has been initiated on 21 May 2015.

The LGR Toolset is expected to be useful for any registry implementing LGRs at any level in the DNS tree, including the Root Zone.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."