At the Metadata Working Group meeting in New York in June, it was agreed that three companies – Vista, Xerox and Yankee – would collaborate on a practical project to test how feasible it was to capture publishers’ ‘terms and conditions’ information, along with all the other information necessary to carry out rights transactions; to express this information in a standard language; and to use it in a rights transaction processing system. The project is focusing on ‘traditional’ publishing (books and journals and their electronic equivalents) and on the professional, scientific, technical and medical area; however, what we learn should have far wider implications.
We set about collecting ‘real life’ examples of publishers’ terms and conditions, by asking a number of publishers to supply typical contracts and other agreements. A great many publishers were enormously cooperative and sent us documents, which the team were able to use to test and improve their systems.
Each of the three companies has a different role in the project. Vista is looking at how to capture all the necessary information as simply as possible within publishers’ own systems (using their own systems as an example). For instance, some can be captured as a by-product of publishers’ contractual and royalty systems; other information would be a by-product of production or other systems.
Xerox is looking at ways of expressing this information in a standard language in order to make it possible for different systems to communicate. They are enhancing their existing Digital Property Rights Language (DPRL) in the light of what they learn from the project; the intention is that DPRL will be freely available for all to use.
Yankee is looking at how to use this information, expressed in DPRL, to drive a third-party rights management system such as their own Copyright Direct (which deals with permissions and the like – what, in the print environment, publishers think of as ‘subsidiary’ rights).
The group hope to be able to demonstrate the pilot system in action, all being well, by the end of the year. If the project is successful, it will show the feasibility of creating, without impossible effort, sufficient metadata to enable largely automated rights transactions in future e-commerce.
I attach a brief report on the group’s inaugural project meeting.
Sally Morris
"Xerox, Vista and YBP met in Boston on 3 September to make plans for
enhancing DPRL to meet
the needs of the publishers and developing a
demonstration system to
illustrate the value this would provide to the
publishers.
We agreed on the following:
1. We need some standard
format for rights metadata exchange and we should
enhance DPRL to meet our
needs
2. We should enhance DPRL by trying to express current contracts
within
DPRL syntax.
3. We should focus on the Professional Publishing
(which includes STM
Publishing) market first and evolve the language and
systems to meet the
specific needs of other publishing industries.
4.
Vista & Xerox would work to extend DPRL such that it can express
the
relevant rights, permissions and royalties information currently stored
in
their systems.
5. Vista, YBP and Xerox would work on a focused subset
of permissions such
that Vista can output the permissions information in DPRL
and YBP can
subsequently read that information and provide rights
management.
6. Vista & YBP would work together to enable the transfer of
information
from CopyrightDirect to Vista system.
Timeline: We would
like to have a concrete (doable) plan by Frankfurt
Bookfair. We don't think
we can commit to demonstrating anything by the
Frankfurt bookfair time. We
however, expect to have something by YE98.
Toward achieving this goal, we
agreed to do the following:
1. YBP will send a note capturing their
conceptual system model and the
scenarios that they envision (by 9/10).
2.
Xerox will immediately distribute the DPRL manual and the Rights
Management
Framework specification, Overview, Users' guide and reference
manuals to
Vista and YBP (by 9/11).
3. Xerox will update the DPRL manual (based on the
inputs that we have
received so far) (by 9/30)
5. Vista will distribute
Data Dictionary that will be a starting point for
DPRL enhancements as well
as system demonstration (by 9/23).
6. Xerox, Vista and YBP will meet in New
Jersey to plan the next level of
detailed planning
Prasad
Ram"