Indecs Content Model
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

indecs (an acronym of "
interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...
of data in
e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...
systems"; written in lower case) was a project partly funded by the European Community ''Info 2000'' initiative and by several organisations representing the music, rights, text publishing, authors, library and other sectors in 1998–2000, which has since been used in a number of
metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...
activities. A final report and related documents were published; the indecs Metadata Framework document is a concise summary. indecs provided an analysis of the requirements for metadata for e-commerce of content (
intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, co ...
) in the network environment, focusing on
semantic interoperability Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable Logic in computer science, logic, inferencing, knowledge discove ...
. indecs was built from a simple generic model of commerce (the "model of making"): a model of the life cycle of any kind of content from conception to the final physical or digital copies. Central to the analysis is the assumption that it is possible to produce a generic mechanism to handle complex metadata for all different types of content. So, for example, instead of treating sound carriers, books, videos and photographs as fundamentally different things with different (if similar) characteristics, they are all recognised as creations with different values of the same higher-level attributes, whose metadata can be supported in a common environment.


Framework

The indecs framework underlines the importance of unique identification of all entities. It also raises the question of authority: the identification of the person making the claim is as significant as the identification of any other entity.


Usage

The indecs framework does not presuppose any specific business model or legal framework; it can be used to describe transactions involving copyrighted, open source, or freely available material. The framework has been further developed as a generic
ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...
-based approach. Its main use to date has been in applications of commercial transactions of content and in some library-related applications. Developments include the OntologyX semantic engineering tools and services from Rightscom.com. The approach also has much in common with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ontology for cultural heritage information, and the
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR ) is a conceptual entity–relationship model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) that relates user tasks of retrieval and access in onlin ...
(FRBR) model. One of the deliverables of the indecs project was a specification for a directory of parties. This led to a subsequent project, Interparty, funded under the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...
's Information Society Technologies Programme, to design and specify a network to support interoperability of party identification (for both natural and corporate names) across different domains, building on the indecs principles. InterParty was not proposed as a replacement for existing schemes, but as a means of effecting their interoperation. Some of its conclusions have been used elsewhere, e.g., in the work on the proposed ISO ISNI ( International Standard Name Identifier).{{Cite web , url=http://isni.org/ , title = ISNI


Intellectual property rights

indecs does not attempt to replace intellectual property rights law, though a specific set of legal elements might be included in an indecs-based structure, and the indecs framework specifically includes some definitions of intellectual property rights from major international treaties such as the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty.


References

Intellectual property law Metadata standards