Chair: John Kunze
At the DC 2003 conference in Seattle, October 2003, the
Agents working group met for 1.5 hours on 2 October.
What follows are notes from that meeting.
Agent Description Core
* History
* Motivation
* Assumptions
* Requirements
* Strategy
History
* Discussion of Agents as a generalization of the CCP elements dates
back to DC:dc
* A single element, with assigned roles
* The current activity is agnostic on this issue; the goal is to
elaborate core elements for describing people and organizations,
not to replace existing attributes of resources
* The Agent Proposal of Old
* The Current Agent Proposal
Agent Description Core Objectives
* Core elements appropriate to identification of people and organizations
Promote convergence among new schemes
* A property set that existing schemes can map into for purposes of
after-the-fact interoperability
* Extend the principles of modularity and extensibility into the
identification of people and organizations
* A core, not exhaustive... should include the ability to reference a
more complete, structured description held in a formal repository.
Assumptions
* Many extant name authority schemas
* Agent Description Core will not displace these schemas, though
widespread adoption may reduce the development of new ones
* Architecture and characteristics embedded in any standard must
flexibly accommodate the management and protection of privacy
What is in Scope?
* Three subclasses of agents are likely to be important in metadata:
persons, organizations, and instruments.
* Instruments are judged to be out of scope in this effort
* Architectural considerations of Dublin Core in no way precludes
further elaboration at a future time
Agents and Rights
* A successful Agent metadata architecture will support assertions of
IP rights
* Link easily to formally managed authority systems such as library
authority files or Interested Party file used to manage music rights
Agent Core and Related Authority Activities
* What is the Relationship of the Agent Core to other authority
activities
* VIAF (http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/viaf/)
* Interparty (http://www.interparty.org/)
* EduPerson (http://www.educause.edu/eduperson/)
* Vcard (http://www.imc.org/pdi/)
* FOAF (http://www.foaf-project.org/)
* Others?
Strategy
* Identify functional requirements of DC Agent Description Core
* Identify and characterize representative agent systems
* Propose elements that support the functional requirements and
provide good interoperability prospects with other critical systems.
Working Group Discussion
* May involve reinventing wheels, but a clear explication of the
functional requirements may make evident the need to do so
* Linking conventions and exchange formats (rather than a full set of
elements) may suffice
* Andy Powell's abstract model is an essential component of solving this
problem (esp. the linking aspects)
* If we have the linking convention, are there some default elements
that might be appropriate for explicit, internal terms within DCMI
namespaces?
Discussion (cont)
* Andy P. can provide some examples of what the linking would look like
in RDF
* Minimum set of elements to define agents might be necessary because
of the diversity of terms across the many existing authority files
- look at Interparty set as a candidate (Robina can post these
to the list)
* INFO URI scheme may provide a means for ID linking from URI space to
un-webulated authority files - its future is not clear at this time
* The variety of candidate related metadata to link to is probably
broad
Discussion (cont)
* Andrew Wilson has volunteered to start a functional requirements
document (Robina indicated the Interparty work has one she can
contribute to the discussion)
* Rights discussion: Rights proposal is under development by Weibel
and Eric Miller, with advice from Andy P.
* Agents group is a good place to identify additional functional
requirements for specifying rights holders
Revisions to Agent Charter
* Develop a funtional requirements for an Agent Description Core
* Identify and evaluate existing agent descriptions against the
functional requirements
* Develop a recommendation for an agent element set
* Provide input to the DCMI Architecture working group concerning the
linking specification to related (agent) metadata within the
abstract model