[mdx] MDX & expressing communites-of-interest
Ian Young
ian at iay.org.uk
Wed May 20 07:44:40 PDT 2009
On 20 May 2009, at 14:51, Thomas Lenggenhager wrote:
> OK. But therefore, it makes much sense to require that a reference to
> the written down practice statement for this affiliation gets added
> into
> the affiliation description, the same way as for the registrars and
> aggregators.
> Then the consumers of such an affiliation description have a chance to
> find out what it means and what not.
I think it would be helpful to talk about a convention for expressing,
say, a link to a document defining the affiliation that could be
included in the affiliation metadata. Even something as simple as
using the OrganizationURL would probably be enough (that's not
necessarily a proposal; as Scott points out we can do pretty much
anything here).
I don't think it's strictly required, though. I think it's analogous
to other entities... we don't currently have a globally agreed
convention for describing the meaning of an SP entity[1] either. The
reason that works in practice for SP entities is that tying the entity
ID to something in the real world can be done out of band *in the
opposite direction*. What I mean by that is that for example, we know
that a particular entity ID corresponds to "Science Direct" not
because the metadata references a document that explains what the
entity means, but because there is a document elsewhere that a human
reads to discover the entity ID that they should associate with
"Science Direct". I think the same logic would probably apply to
affiliation entities too.
-- Ian
[1] ... although I'm sure that each federation currently does
something specific in this area and perhaps we *should* think about
what such an agreed convention should look like if we're going to be
swapping metadata and want to make it as useful as possible.
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