A more standardized alternative to Whois
The Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is an alternative to WHOIS for accessing Internet resource registration data. RDAP is designed to address a number of shortcomings in the existing Whois service. The most important changes are:
- Standardization of queries and responses
- Internationalization considerations to cater for languages other than English in data objects
- Redirection capabilities to allow seamless referrals to other registries
Read more about the origin and reasons behind this work and the history of Whois in the APNIC News article, "The Future of Whois", May 2012.