Workshop on Technology of
Terms and Conditions
September 24-26, 1996
Report of Working Group 4
Participants: Sarah Sully, Judith Klavans, Peter Jaszi, Dale Flecker, and Martin Röscheisen
Report Prepared by: Peter Jaszi and Sarah Sully
Our group met to consider issues of scale and user representation in the design of terms and conditions. Although our original intention had been to focus on the special design concerns posed by unbounded domains, we reached an early consensus that those problems represented special cases of more general ones, which we then attempted to identify.
We began our discussion by noting the typology of issues in user representation which were developed in the Dublin-Core and Warwick projects (e.g., those of category identification, semantics, and syntax). We noted that these issues are presented in aggravated form where the goal of a particular exercise is to develop tools which retain validity and utility when employed across domain boundaries.
Specifically, we noted that where the goal of an exercise is to achieve a useful general representation of users, rather than one which has validity within a single domain, three issue sets are presented: efficiency, practicality, and policy.
Attempting to break down the components of these issue sets, we devoted some time to considering the problem of dynamism, which affects both the efficiency and the practicality of large-scale efforts to specify user identities. In order to retain its utility, a user database must be regularly updated; however, the difficulty of performing such updates increases dramatically as the scale of the population (and the number of separate domains from which it is drawn) grows. Even within a single domain (such as a university library's user database), the constant updating of user information may be difficult, and these difficulties may be compounded by scale (e.g., when attempts are made to represent the users of all university libraries in a region or country). To the extent that user databases representing different domains are managed differently for updating purposes, the scope of the problem grows further.
With respect to issues of policy, we spent considerable time trying to develop subclassifications, such as the relationship of policy to technical infrastructure, data collection, access to/use of data, location of policy-making function, and acceptance of policy. Running through all of these subclassifications was a common theme: concern about data privacy. This concern figured significantly in our discussion, and we concluded that it should be the focus of further inquiry.
Finally, we spent a short time talking about the intellectual property dimensions of large-scale user data sets (i.e. who owns the data collected, and what legal regimes, if any, may be relevant to protect it against unauthorized access and use). This issue also deserves further study.