The register contains the following objects that can be processed by the automaton:

• Accounts. The account object contains the details of the registrant - the name, company details, whois opt-out, addresses and contact details. It can be referred to directly by its account identifier. Registrant accounts are specific to the registrar that the domains are held on; a registrant with domains with more than one registrar needs an account for each registrar.
• Domain names.  These are now cut down versions of the previous objects solely storing information that is unique to domain names.
• Contacts.  These are now separate objects that are associated with an account but are not shared between accounts.  Each account can have up to 3 admin and 3 billing contacts associated with it.  These objects can be referred to directly by their contact identifiers.
• Nameservers.  Nameserver details (name and ip addresses) are held in separate registry objects that can be referred to directly by their identifiers. Nameserver objects are specific to the registrar that the domain names that refer to them are on.

Old structure

Our current data structure is a major change from our previous data structure where each record was for a domain name and included all the details of the registrant with that domain.  In addition, there are a number of other changes from our old data structure:

• The usage and meaning of admin contact has changed.  The old admin contact was intended to store data on the person responsible for the domain.  However this functionality was made obsolete many years ago when the registrant contact was introduced.  In the current system the old admin and registrant contacts have gone and we now have up to three admin contacts that are intended to be registrant contacts.
• The old technical contact fields have been finally deleted and continuing usage will cause errors.
• The ips-key field has changed name to registrar-tag.  It was always a confusing name.

We planned for as much backwards compatibility as possible to make the changeover manageable, but we still strongly recommend that you read the field definitions page to see the details.