| Greetings earthlings I will, unfortunately, be unable to participate in the April 2 meeting either physically or virtually - I expect to be 8 miles high somewhere over China. Meanwhile, I'd like to plug the importance of sorting out the mission - i.e. what would constitute a good outcome for Kendra. For me there are two interesting starting points. The first is the metaphor of the signpost (http://www.kendra.org.uk/wiki/wiki.pl?KendraSignposts), and the second is the metaphor of the Universal Catalogue that featured in the invitation to the recent. summit in London. I very much like the original signpost idea. For me an interoperable digital media signpost needs to meet the following pointing requirements: 1. Point to an unambiguously identified content item or group of content items. It should do this in a way that recognises that different user communities have different content identification requirements and formats and that no one scheme is going to predominate (think ISANs, UMIDs, ASINs etc.). They have to coexist. A useful signpost will at least provide a universal way of indicating the relevant identification scheme and the issuing authority responsible for a particular identifier (it may also point to documentation on the scheme and to any mapping resources to other schemes). 2. Point to one or more locations where the content item or group of content items can be acquired (or to a location where current content location information can be obtained. In the latter case the content location scheme needs, at the very least, to be identified (e.g. "it's a CRID"). 3. Point to one or more locations where a description of the content ("metadata") can be obtained. This is the fun one - no shortage of interoperability challenges! As with content identification, there is a need to, at the very least, identify the content description scheme, the authority responsible for the description and to point to locations of documentation and mapping resources (expect interesting developments here from the EBU...). The additional requirement that the signpost model be independent of any particular method of _expression_ (e.g. a particular XML or RDF schema) also seems very important. In addition to an implementation-neutral model, it would nonetheless be useful to have some expressions for particular usage domains. These should be 100% in the public domain. I don't think any one of us should spend one minute on coming up with technical and other solutions without first establishing a cast iron IPR regime (try googling "MHP" and "patent" if you're puzzled by this concern). A catalogue is, at heart, a collection of signposts so I won't say much on the subject for now (except that a Universal Catalogue could only be a distributed, multifarious beast in a networked world (i.e. not one directory on the hard disc of one computer in a bunker somewhere near Omaha). What's needed is a universal framework for digital content signposting and cataloguing. It could also be that for universal signposting and cataloguing to work there may be a need to establish some enabling infrastructure. A registry and repository (on http://purl.org?) for documentation and mapping resources to enable interoperation between content identification, location and description schemes springs to mind. I wish you all a productive meeting and, once I come back down to earth, look forward to contributing to future Kendra activities. Have fun. - Colin On 31 Mar 2007, at 17:13, Daniel Harris wrote:
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