Use of Indecs
The indecs Framework does not presuppose any specific business model or legal framework; it can be used to describe transactions of copyrighted, open source, or freely available material.
The framework has been developed further as a generic ontology-based approach dealing with defined types of entity and attribute, and the relators that link them within a contextual model structure (where context is defined as an intersection of time and place, in which entities may play roles). Its main use to date has been in applications of commercial transactions of content and in some library-related applications. Examples of applications using this approach include:
- RDA/ONIX Framework for Resource Categorization
- ISO/IEC 21000-6 (MPEG) Rights Data Dictionary (RDD)
- DDEX (Digital Data Exchange) Music industry messaging and data dictionary applications
- ONIX (Online Information Exchange) standards for the use of publishers in distributing digital metadata about their products (See also EDItEUR: ONIX for Books)
- Digital Object Identifier System metadata schemes
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'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 for the identification of participants in the intellectual property domain (e.g. national library name authority files or systems oriented towards the needs of rights licensing) 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).
Other developments are continuing, notably through the OntologyX semantic engineering tools and services from Rightscom. 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 (FRBR) model in the library world.
In June 2009 a new initiative, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF), was announced by a consortium of partners. Funded by JISC, in Nov 2009 this delivered (as the first phase of an ongoing program of work) an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from nine major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities. The mapping is also extensible to other standards. The work builds on the principles of interoperability established in the indecs Content Model, and is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework for Resource Categorization into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities. The International DOI Foundation, which fully endorses this work, is to provide a web hosting facility for the Framework as part of its commitment to promoting the wider use of interoperable metadata, and will use the vocabulary mapping wherever possible to support the association of metadata with DOI names
Read more about this topic: Indecs Content Model