Indecs Content Model

Indecs Content Model

indecs (an acronym of "interoperability of data in e-commerce systems"; written in lower case) was a project part 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 activities. A final report and related documents were published; the indecs Metadata Framework document "Principles, model and data dictionary" is a concise summary.

indecs provided an analysis of the requirements for metadata for e-commerce of content (intellectual property) in the network environment, focussing on semantic interoperability. Semantic interoperability deals with the question of how one computer system knows what the terms from another computer system mean (e.g. if A says "owner" and B says "owner", are they referring to the same thing? If A says "released" and B says "disseminated", do they mean different things?).

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. The top-level model is summarised as "people make stuff; people use stuff; and (for commerce to take place) people make deals about the stuff". If secure machine-to-machine management of commerce is to be possible, the stuff, the people and the deals must all be securely identified and described in standardised ways that machines can interpret and use. 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.