[mdx] MDX & expressing communites-of-interest

[Ian Young]

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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