whois server features

[ag4ve.us at gmail.com (shawn wilson)]

On Wed, Jan 7, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:
>>> So, youâ??re not running into a poorly-documented mystery, youâ??ve run afoul of one of the rotten armpits of the shub-Internet.
>>>
>> So there's no consensus between NICs for the information they should
>> have in whois and what search mechanisms they should provide? I guess
>> what you're saying is that whois is just a protocol definition and
>> nothing else?
>
> Correct.  It gets you a blob of text.  Sometimes, a blob is just a blob.  Other times, it contains what _appear_ to be key-value pairs, but are instead loosely-formatted text.  Other times, it contains textually-represented key-value pairs that are programmatically generated from an actual database, and can thus be re-imported into another database.  Depends whatâ??s on the back end.
>

This is not the response I was looking for (and reading the RFC makes
me feel even worse).

Is there a better mechanism for querying NICs for host/owner information?