February 18, 2014 archive

What is the best way to visualize the DNSSEC deployment status of the “generic top-level-domains (gTLDs)” in our DNSSEC deployment maps that go out weekly?  Obviously since gTLDs (including the “newgTLDs”) are not tied to a country, there is no way to display them on an actual map as we do for all the ccTLDs.

Given that, how else could display the gTLDs in a way that is useful?   Right now, their DNSSEC deployment status is included in the CSV files that are sent out to subscribers of the dnssec-maps mailing list (to which anyone can subscribe).  But could we create an image of some type that showed the different deployment states?  Perhaps something like the image in this post (only with the actual Unicode characters)?

And what would be the best way to do that given that we’ll soon have hundreds and maybe even thousands of generic TLDs?

My primary interest is to have some image that we can use in presentations (or on a website) that visualizes the current state of DNSSEC deployment within the gTLDs.  We’re tracking the data in our database… we just need some way to make it more interesting then simply a list out of a CSV file.

I’d be curious to hear any feedback you all may have, either left as a response to this blog post, as a comment on the issue I opened up on Github, in social media where this is posted or as email back to us.

And then, of course, I need someone with sufficient python background working with image-generation libraries who can help make the visual image a reality…   but let’s perhaps figure what we want first, eh?