An authority area is associated with an RWhois server and a lexically hierarchical label, which is considered to be its name. An authority area is a piece of the distributed database that speaks with authority about its assigned part of the hierarchy. All data associated with a particular lexically hierarchical tag should be located within that authority area's database. Authority areas are further explained in Section 2.4. RWhois directs clients toward the appropriate authority area by generating referrals.
Referrals are pointers to other servers that are presumed to be closer to the desired data.
The client uses this referral to contact the next server and ask the same question.