No. This project is not about gathering information which we intend to sell to any parties. Not only the ISP-facing side of this service is provided free-of-charge, but the consumer-side of this service as well.

At the time of this writing no cooperation with IP Geolocation database providers is in effect.
We are however working on getting IP Geolocation providers to pull their information from the feeds provided by this service.

If you are an IP Geolocation provider or a consumer of these feeds and believe that a cooperation could benefit both you and OpenGeoFeed, please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@opengeofeed.org.

OpenGeoFeed is provided free-of-charge to all interested parties.

We would be happy to hear from you. If you need to get in touch with us, please drop us an email at info@opengeofeed.org.

Well, please help yourself.

We invite you to use our self-signup at https://opengeofeed.org/signup/

No. OpenGeoFeed is designed in a way that only the owner of given IP network can announce their geolocation information.

More information about the details of our verification process can be found at How do you establish the owner relationship of a given network?.

Right now we would like you to submit your questions via email.

Please have a look at the How to contact you? FAQ and don’t hesitate to drop us an email.

self-published geofeeds, as defined in Internet Draft: Self-published IP Geolocation Data provide means for a service provider to announce the geolocation information for their IP address ranges.

OpenGeoFeed was developed and is hosted by ANEXIA Internetdienstleistungs GmbH.

We firmly believe in the ideas behind self-published geofeeds.

At ANEXIA we know the issues that arise when hosting multiple IP subnets in regions all over the world and the time required to update that information at IP Geolocation database providers.

Thus we support the idea of having an approach to publish this information ourselves and have IP Geolocation database providers fetch that information. Also, we believe that this method also offers a benefit to aforementioned database providers as well, because updating their databases can be automated and hence the administrative burden on their end can be minimized as well.

A quote from the section “Motivation” of the aforementioned Internet Draft:

Providers of services over the Internet have grown to depend on best-
effort geolocation information to improve the user experience.
Locality information can aid in directing traffic to the nearest
serving location, inferring likely native language, and providing
additional context for services involving search queries.

When an ISP, for example, changes the location where an IP prefix is
deployed, services which make use of geolocation information may
begin to suffer degraded performance. This can lead to customer
complaints, possibly to the ISP directly. Dissemination of correct
geolocation data is complicated by the lack of any centralized means
to coordinate and communicate geolocation information to all
interested consumers of the data.

No. At the time of this writing the only way of adding an autonomous system is through the abuse mailbox process.

We are however considering other verification methods, like remark entries with a verification code in the WHOIS server’s response.

The owner relationship is established by a two-step process.

First of all, a user can only gain access to the feeds for autonomous systems they are able to verify ownership for.
This verification is done by sending an e-mail with an activation link to the abuse contact of the autonomous system a user asks to manage.
After the activation link is opened, the system will recognize the user asking for ownership as a manager of the given autonomous system.

Now the second step of the process comes into play. The system will automatically determine which IP networks are owned by the autonomous system. These will be imported into OpenGeoFeed automatically and updated periodically (or on user-request).
The networks imported this way form the supernetworks for which geolocation information may be provided.

In short this means that geolocation information can only be added to networks imported by the process described above or subnetworks thereof.

The validator service provided at opengeofeed.org/validator uses the geofeed_validator Python module, which is available as an open-source project from Github.

The validation process itself makes sure the following information inside the feed is valid:

• ISO3316 Country Codes
• ISO3316 Region/Subdivision Codes
• IP networks are public, non-multicast, non-loopback networks
• IP networks are not contained multiple times within the same feed
• An ISO3316 Country Code is provided if there is an ISO3316 Region and matches the country of that region
• An ISO3316 Country Code is provided if there is a city or zipcode defined.
• [draft extension] If provided, if the default allocation size is valid for the IP version of the IP network.

The abuse contact for an autonomous system is determined by doing WHOIS queries against the responsible WHOIS servers. The first defined abuse contact e-mail address or mailbox in the information returned by the WHOIS server is used then.

Feeds are updated periodically. Whilst the AS-specific feeds are updated about once every 5-10 minutes right now, the public feed is updated hourly.

Please also bear in mind that we may cache responses for a short while, in order to be able to operate this service more efficiently.