Classes offer a wide variery of possibilities within various context.

Basic Market Economics.
Overall Advantages :
Multilingual Scripts
Empowering the Semantic Web
Security
Specific Applications :
NGN Namespace / CountryClasses
Internet of Things Namespace , M2M / ONS & OID
Proxy with Handle
Trademarks
Market Places
Linguistic Diversity
Cultural Diversity
Science & Education
Arts / Global Patronage
Regions & Cities & Communities
3D web & Virtual Worlds

WSIS Geneva C2.Information and communication infrastructure action line :
Governments should take action, in the framework of national development policies, in order to support an enabling and competitive environment for the necessary investment in ICT infrastructure and for the development of new services.

Name Resolving services => ICT Software Infrastructure
Prevailing Economics models promote the end of monopolies

Classess allow to open the competition within DNS services
in a way that is compatible and interoperable with the current DNS service.
It does not lead like Alternative DNS roots to a fragmented namespace.

The Handle System is another competitor, but not as easily interoperable with the DNS.

• In order to send a mail to secrétaire@académie-française.org, or to иван@русский.рϕ, the problem becomes more complicated, because secrétaire and иван are encoded in UTF-8 et académie-française and русский.рϕ are encoded in Puny Code.

• The protocol to solve this issue has been finalized in September 2008 ( RFC 5335 , RFC 5336 & RFC 5337 )
  
  

Instead one may ask the simple question : Should it be possible to conceive a homogeneous , coherent, multilingual UTF-8 DNS system ?

classes could use UTF8 encoding
=> simpler and more efficient implementation of multilingualism,
instead of the IDNA system, based on ASCII and transcription UTF8 - ASCII.
because there is no legacy problem, and we start from scratch.

A slight software modification concerns canonicalization ( upper/lower case equivalence ).

The semantic web, = metadata and logic languages schemes (ontologies)
=> more relevant access to data than in full text.

Empower the semantic web by implementing classes, called semantic classes

The legal and technological innovation = owners of domain names are contractually obliged to follow a specific ontology
or to lose their domain names.
Ontologies will be defined for each TLD in the class.
=> namespaces where metadata may be trusted.

Several major consequences : => transform the related content into a gigantic database
=> enable automatic computer transactions, M2M
=> redefine the search engines' market, currently relying on full text harvesting.

Possible to define classes whose values are the telephone Country Codes : Country Classes.

naturally fit to carry VoIP phone traffic, but able as well to carry any other type of IP traffic.

The phone country codes are managed by the E.164 ITU-T recommendation

Interesting side-effect :

Not possible for a centralized authority to remove or control access to this national namespace, as it is the case for ccTLDs. ( eg .iq ).
because, unlike the ccTLD root server address that is on a remote computer database for each class, the root servers addresses are included in the
so called " DNS cache " file used by each DNS server.

Within the Object Naming Service (ONS) , the Electronic Product Code ( EPC) is encoded as a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

eg : 000024.0614141.sgtin.id.onsepc.com

ONS namespace ( secundary .com namespace ) is maintained by Verisign.
but recently, because of political pressures, another ONS root onsepc1.eu should be activated.

ONS namespace should become orders of magnitude larger that all the existing DNS namespace
==> Stunning that this namespace should should through only one or two DNS internet domain names !.

Concerning Object Identifier (OID) , integration with the DNS system is currently under discussion by the ITU-T Study Group 17 which hold an ad hoc meeting on Thursday 16 September on this very topic !

Obviously, at least a DNS class should be appropriate for the Networks of Things.

The Handle System is very well suited for the for the Internet of things
But, it might not emerge as a direct resolver, for non-technical reasons.

=> a DNS class dedicated to the DNS gateways to the Handle System.
=> DNS class under the governance of the CNRI, that could manage the class root database and decides on security protocols.

DNS classes in direct relationship with the 45 classes of trademarks ( Nice agreement ). Brands related to different classes could co-exist peacefully and legally in the cyberspace.
=> solve legal problems in a coherent fashion.
=> allow search engines to take into account the trademark class parameter

For commercial communication ( advertisement, online transaction, etc ), Domain Names from DNS trademark classes might emerge soon as a quasi-requirement whenever they become available. If not used, suspicion of forgery and counterfeiting might arise.

=> trusted namespace for brands
=> legal and commercial security
=> economic growth.

DNS trademarks classes under the governance of WIPO

A Semantic class including TLDs devoted to specific commercial or industrial activities

=> allow effective price comparison

=> enable automated transaction

=> enable computer-assisted human transaction

It is proposed to create a class comprising Linguistic Semantic TLDs or LSTLDs.
=> A TLD assigned to each language according to the three-letter code ISO 639-2 )
=> sites or sites' versions written in specific languages can be easily found and identified.
=> facilitate greatly the task of search engines .
=> Automatic translation much improved if automatic tools could work with several human certified translations of the same text.

The prevailing westerm culture might be so invasive on the Internet that it might threaten culture diversity.

In some case, some permitted content in one culture is felt offensive in others.

Therefore, some DNS classes could be devoted to specific cultures.

When using one of these cultural classes, the user should be (almost) ensured not to stumble by error or by being cheated, into sites containing offensive content.

This cultural class concept could also be used to build special space for children depending on their culture. and insure protection from harmfull content.

A great tragedy is that most fundamental scientific information is not freely availalble on the Internet, although academic authors are giving for free their accounts for their research to Journal that are resselling them at an inflated price. ( for more information, see the site of the WSIS CS Scientific Information WG )

As a semantic class transforms its namespace into a gigantic database.
=> Open access ressources ( journal, archives ) should be included into a scientific semantic class, and
=> would be accessible and searchable in a vastly improved manner.

In contrast, proprietary information, searchable only through proprietary databases, could not benefit of this technical advance.

The Shared Name ( Science Commons ) project has been developing URIs to facilate naming of Open Access ressources.

Providing financing to artists, in general authors and contributors to digital works, is a challenge in the Internet age.

Repressive laws that are trying to map forcibly caracteritics of non-digital works into the cyberspace are ineffective and counter-productive.

Instead a new scheme has been proposed, the Global Patronage that relies on a new legal approach based on appreciation, instead of consumption.
However to express appreciation to a certain work, the metadata has to be well structured to insured proper and trusted identification. Therefore a DNS class for this task would be quite appropriate, under the multistakeholder governance of artists and authors.

There have campaigns for TLDs for cities aka CityTLDs ( eg : dot BERLIN , and a few others ).

Creating cityTLD or regionTLDs in a dedicated multilingual semantic DNS classes, without the financial and technical constraints imposed by ICANN, could empower local authorities to implement societal ICT strategies.

A DNS class could be devoted to virtual worlds, where avaters are ensured to be able to move technically from one world to another. A dedicated governance is required to enforce "transportability".

The current trend in the "Metaverse" is to conceive Worlds as new generation of Web sites, which are "visited" in 3D, instead of being "browsed". In this context OpenSim strives to become the Apâche of Virtual Worlds

Some protocols such as Metaverse_Exchange_Protocol are being developed.

Naming services are key components of the software infrastructure of IP based network.
The use of Namespace classes => provide an enabling and competitive environment
in accordance with the recommendations of the WSIS C2.Information and communication infrastructure action line.