AFNIC has been involved since 2007, in collaboration with GS1 France, in a project dealing with IoT and more particularly, with ONS, a technology related to its core business, the DNS. This project represents a major development for the ONS, addressing requirements expressed notably by some European political figures and major RFID and supply-chain players.
In 2009, AFNIC implemented a federated ONS platform reflecting the proposal it had published in 2008. This proposal itself was based on a document by GS1 Canada. It should be noted that all this work has been incorporated into a multi-partner project called WINGS, funded by the French Research Agency, ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche).
The aim of the federated ONS is to offer a new model of governance in which the ultimate responsibility for the management of the target ONS system no longer falls to one country or one organisation (single root), but is distributed evenly between several players (multi-root).
