If you've ever completed a large and difficult jigsaw puzzle, you'll be familiar with that particular moment of grateful revelation when you find that two sections you've been working on separately actually fit together. The overall picture becomes coherent, and the task at last seems achievable. Something like this seems to be happening in the puzzle of "content metadata." Two communities -- rights owners on one hand, libraries and cataloguers on the other -- are staring at their unfolding data models and systems, knowing that somehow together they make up a whole picture. This paper aims to show how and where they fit.
ISBN
1082-9873
Critical Arguements
CA "This paper looks at metadata developments from this standpoint -- hence the "right" approach -- but does so recognising that in the digital world many Chinese walls that appear to separate the bibliographic and commercial communities are going to collapse." ... "This paper examines three propositions which support the need for radical integration of metadata and rights management concerns for disparate and heterogeneous materials, and sets out a possible framework for an integrated approach. It draws on models developed in the CIS plan and the DOI Rights Metadata group, and work on the ISRC, ISAN, and ISWC standards and proposals. The three propositions are: DOI metadata must support all types of creation; The secure transaction of requests and offers data depends on maintaining an integrated structure for documenting rights ownership agreements; All elements of descriptive metadata (except titles) may also be elements of agreements. The main consequences of these propositions are: A cross-sector vocabulary is essential; Non-confidential terms of rights ownership agreements must be generally accessible in a standard form. (In its purest form, the e-commerce network must be able to automatically determine the current owner of any right in any creation for any territory.); All descriptive metadata values (except titles) must be stored as unique, coded values. If correct, the implications of these propositions on the behaviour, and future inter-dependency, of the rights-owning and bibliographic communities are considerable."
Phrases
<P1> Historically, metadata -- "data about data" -- has been largely treated as an afterthought in the commercial world, even among rights owners. Descriptive metadata has often been regarded as the proper province of libraries, a battlefield of competing systems of tags and classification and an invaluable tool for the discovery of resources, while "business" metadata lurked, ugly but necessary, in distribution systems and EDI message formats. Rights metadata, whatever it may be, may seem to have barely existed in a coherent form at all. <P2> E-commerce offers the opportunity to integrate the functions of discovery, access, licensing and accounting into single point-and-click actions in which metadata is a critical agent, a glue which holds the pieces together. <warrant> <P3> E-commerce in rights will generate global networks of metadata every bit as vital as the networks of optical fibre -- and with the same requirements for security and unbroken connectivity. <warrant> <P4> The sheer volume and complexity of future rights trading in the digital environment will mean that any but the most sporadic level of human intervention will be prohibitively expensive. Standardised metadata is an essential component. <warrant> <P5> Just as the creators and rights holders are the sources of the content for the bibliographic world, so it seems inevitable they will become the principal source of core metadata in the web environment, and that metadata will be generated simultaneously and at source to meet the requirements of discovery, access, protection, and reward. <P6> However, under the analysis being carried out within the communities identified above and by those who are developing technology and languages for rights-based e-commerce, it is becoming clear that "functional" metadata is also a critical component. It is metadata (including identifiers) which defines a creation and its relationship to other creations and to the parties who created and variously own it; without a coherent metadata infrastructure e-commerce cannot properly flow. Securing the metadata network is every bit as important as securing the content, and there is little doubt which poses the greater problem. <warrant> <P7> Because creations can be nested and modified at an unprecedented level, and because online availability is continuous, not a series of time-limited events like publishing books or selling records, dynamic and structured maintenance of rights ownership is essential if the currency and validity of offers is to be maintained. <warrant> <P8> Rights metadata must be maintained and linked dynamically to all of its related content. <P9> A single, even partial, change to rights ownership in the original creation needs to be communicated through this chain to preserve the currency of permissions and royalty flow. There are many options for doing this, but they all depend, among other things, on the security of the metadata network. <warrant> <P10>As digital media causes copyright frameworks to be rewritten on both sides of the Atlantic, we can expect measures of similar and greater impact at regular intervals affecting any and all creation types: yet such changes can be relatively simple to implement if metadata is held in the right way in the right place to begin with. <warrant> <P11> The disturbing but inescapable consequence is that it is not only desirable but essential for all elements of descriptive metadata, except for titles, to be expressed at the outset as structured and standardised values to preserve the integrity of the rights chain. <P12> Within the DOI community, which embraces commercial and library interests, the integration of rights and descriptive metadata has become a matter of priority. <P13> What is required is that the establishment of a creation description (for example, the registration of details of a new article or audio recording) or of change of rights control (for example, notification of the acquisition of a work or a catalogue of works) can be done in a standardised and fully structured way. <warrant> <P14> Unless the chain is well maintained at source, all downstream transactions will be jeopardised, for in the web environment the CIS principle of "do it once, do it right" is seen at its ultimate. A single occurrence of a creation on the web, and its supporting metadata, can be the source for all uses. <P15> One of the tools to support this development is the RDF (Resource Description Framework). RDF provides a means of structuring metadata for anything, and it can be expressed in XML. <P16> Although formal metadata standards hardly exist within ISO, they are appearing through the "back door" in the form of mandatory supporting data for identifier standards such as ISRC, ISAN and ISWC. A major function of the INDECS project will be to ensure the harmonisation of these standards within a single framework. <P17> In an automated, protected environment, this requires that the rights transaction is able to generate automatically a new descriptive metadata set through the interaction of the agreement terms with the original creation metadata. This can only happen (and it will be required on a massive scale) if rights and descriptive metadata terminology is integrated and standardised. <warrant> <P18>As resources become available virtually, it becomes as important that the core metadata itself is not tampered with as it is that the object itself is protected. Persistence is now not only a necessary characteristic of identifiers but also of the structured metadata that attends them. <P19> This leads us also to the conclusion that, ideally, standardised descriptive metadata should be embedded into objects for its own protection. <P20> It also leads us to the possibility of metadata registration authorities, such as the numbering agencies, taking wider responsibilities. <P21>If this paper is correct in its propositions, then rights metadata will have to rewrite half of Dublin Core or else ignore it entirely. <P22> The web environment with its once-for-all means of access provides us with the opportunity to eliminate duplication and fragmentation of core metadata; and at this moment, there are no legacy metadata standards to shackle the information community. We have the opportunity to go in with our eyes open with standards that are constructed to make the best of the characteristics of the new digital medium. <warrant>
Conclusions
RQ "The INDECS project (assuming its formal adoption next month), in which the four major communities are active, and with strong links to ISO TC46 and MPEG, will provide a cross-sector framework for this work in the short-term. The DOI Foundation itself may be an appropriate umbrella body in the future. We may also consider that perhaps the main function of the DOI itself may not be, as originally envisaged, to link user to content -- which is a relatively trivial task -- but to provide the glue to link together creation, party, and agreement metadata. The model that rights owners may be wise to follow in this process is that of MPEG, where the technology industry has tenaciously embraced a highly-regimented, rolling standardisation programme, the results of which are fundamental to the success of each new generation of products. Metadata standardisation now requires the same technical rigour and commercial commitment. However, in the meantime the bibliographic world, working on what it has always seen its own part of the jigsaw puzzle, is actively addressing many of these issues in an almost parallel universe. The question remains as to how in practical terms the two worlds, rights and bibliographic, can connect, and what may be the consequences of a prolonged delay in doing so." ... "The former I encourage to make a case for continued support and standardisation of a flawed Dublin Core in the light of the propositions I have set out in this paper, or else engage with the DOI and rights owner communities in its revision to meet the real requirements of digital commerce in its fullest sense."
SOW
DC "There are currently four major active communities of rights-holders directly confronting these questions: the DOI community, at present based in the book and electronic publishing sector; the IFPI community of record companies; the ISAN community embracing producers, users, and rights owners of audiovisuals; and the CISAC community of collecting societies for composers and publishers of music, but also extending into other areas of authors' rights, including literary, visual, and plastic arts." ... "There are related rights-driven projects in the graphic, photographic, and performers' communities. E-commerce means that metadata solutions from each of these sectors (and others) require a high level of interoperability. As the trading environment becomes common, traditional genre distinctions between creation-types become meaningless and commercially destructive."
