DCMI Agents Working Group

Agents Working Group Report -- DC 2002, Florence

Chairs: John Kunze, José Borbinha

At the DC 2002 conference in Florence, October 2002, the Agents working group met for 2 hours on each of 2 days. The first day began with a review of the action items from DC 2001 (Tokyo) and the group status report. Discussion moved on to the milestone of developing a list of CCP qualifiers; the expectation was that this achieving this would be a
two-part task resulting in a proposal for a set of MARC Relators (roles such as publisher, illustrator, editor, etc.)
and a proposal for structured values for CCP elements.

This led to discussion of two important DC Usage Board decisions relevant for DC Agents. First, approval of the
idea of letting the US Library of Congress "bless" and maintain the MARC Relator terms (about 185 terms) as Dublin
Core Agent/CCP element qualifiers. If this occurs, the DCMI is likely to view this as partial completion of our
milestone. Consensus among the assembled group was to endorse this UB decision.

The second UB decision was to declare that dc:creator would be a refinement of dc:contributor (dc:creator will still be
usable as a top-level element). Consensus was to request the UB members present (Andy Powell, Diane Hillman) to clarify whether loc:creator or dc:creator refines dc:contributor.

Then Warwick Cathro gave some background on the Agent element set notion, and this led to discussion of Robina Clayphan's proposal regarding structured values (AgentDetail) for CCP elements. Rough consensus emerged that there was a need in some cases to be able to describe agents (eg, affiliation, email address) completely external to resource descriptions, and in other cases to include some agent details in resource descriptions. A group decision was taken conduct an investigation into requirements for an Agent Core (Warwick volunteered).

The second day began with a very interesting presentation by Robina Clayphan on the INTERPARTY project, which touches on many topics pertinent to DC Agents (authority, existence, identification, rights management, etc). Then John Kunze gave a summary of the work going on in the DELOS/NSF Actors working group (which had just met in Florence).

Next, the group went back to work on the issues related to appropriate places to include agent information. Decisions
were taken to seek further articulation of the two main opposing views (inclusion vs. exclusion of agent details from
resource descriptions).

In the remainder of the time, Stuart Weibel gave a very brief recap of his current thinking on an Agent linking convention
proposal. The group discussed this and decided that the proposal was essentially sound but that a simplified convention should be articulated.

DC Agents WG -- Decision Summary

Decision 1

who: Warwick Cathro, [email protected]
what: Will write up a feasibility investigation into the requirements for an Agent Core.
when: progress report by December 20, final report by March 2003

Decision 2

who: Andy Powell | Diane Hillman
what: Will articulate pros (Andy) and cons (Diane) of the concept of including URIs and email addresses in Agent/CCP values.
when: in an email to dc-agents by December 1

Decision 3

who: John Kunze
what: Will try to synthesize Andy and Diane's, revisiting Robina Clayphan's "structured value" AgentDetail proposal.
when: by December 15

Decision 4

who: Stuart Weibel
what: Will propose a 3-component (3 maximum) Agent linking convention (eg, appropriate literal, link, link type).
when: by November 1