Showcase: Company Directory website
All of the contact data on this website is fetched from DNS TXT records. It's an example of how NUM data can be used.
A small team and I have created NUM because we believe that paid, restricted, rate-limited APIs provided by the giants of the web are holding back developers and we want to change that.
NUM provides a simple way for businesses to provide machine-readable data direct to their users, bypassing data hoarding web giants; a forever free, unlimited and unrestricted source of data to developers.
The general-purpose semantic web has failed because the standards (microdata, JSON-LD, Open Graph) are too complicated and difficult for small businesses to adopt and often forgotten about by marketing teams in large businesses because data is too difficult to edit.
NUM is different because it can be adopted by any business using a simple online form. The protocol includes two DNS queries – the first to the authoritative DNS zone; the second failover query to our NUM Server, any business can claim their domain on NUM Server using a simple online process.
The Company Directory website is just one example of how NUM data can be used. The website fetches all data on company listing pages from DNS using client-side Cloudflare DNS-over-HTTPS calls (see Network tab in Dev Tools). Barclays, or any other company listed can update the data on this site by adopting the NUM protocol independently in their own DNS – for example, to replace the data for the Barclays listing, they can create a TXT record at 1._num.barclays.co.uk or claim the record shown by visiting numserver.com/claim/barclays.co.uk
DNS-based protocols like NUM (other examples are SPF and DMARC) typically suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem where no-one looks for this data in DNS because it's not there, and no one stores this data in DNS because no-one is looking for it.
To help overcome this, we've pre-populated the DNS with contact data for large UK companies and are in the process of automatically gathering contact data for all *.uk domain names (we expect to complete this in the next 10 days) before moving on to all other UK companies, then companies worldwide (the US, Canada, Australia next).
NUM can be adopted / edited with a simple online form. Anyone can create a record for their domain, either independently in their own DNS or using our service at app.numserver.com/tools/editor/add.
To ensure that NUM is as efficient as possible, we store all data in DNS using MODL – a compact, DNS-friendly data serialisation format; we make compact DNS objects developer friendly using Unpacker – we have developed both in-house. I have written a very basic post to explain how all of these technologies fit together.
To simplify all of this for front-end developers (who by and large don't care about DNS), we've packaged it up in a Typscript library called company-api which you can query for a domain and get a beautiful object back containing company contact data.
We are very keen for feedback, good or bad. Please contact us if you have any comments.