Rights Automation Community Group: Subject/Object (fka Debtor/Creditor) Breakout Recap

Hello everyone,



The breakout group met last week to find replacement terms to "Creditor" and "Debtor" in the context of an Action, where "Debtor" is the party required to perform the Action, and "Creditor" is the party to whom the action is done. We propose to solve the problem by breaking it into two distinct parts:



*       New terms for Debtor and Creditor: We decided that this is fundamentally a grammatical problem, and so settled on the terms Subject and Object. Logically, if an Action has a Predicate (the action to be done) then it also has a Subject (the performer of the Action) and an Object (the recipient of the Action). In ODRL, this would look like this example of an Invoice duty, where the data originator (the Subject) has the obligation to send an invoice to the data consumer (the Object)



:D5                       a                                         odrl:Duty ;

nl:subject                         <https://permid.org/1-123456789&gt;<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpermid.org%2F1-123456789%3E&data=02%7C01%7Cbenedict.whittamsmith%40refinitiv.com%7C04395ec9ca794f714cfb08d863c3715c%7C71ad2f6261e244fc9e8586c2827f6de9%7C0%7C0%7C637369038355082742&sdata=Y9AnW21jpbaNr2WLG4HjykymuuNuYQGT%2BRlmDd9BkcE%3D&reserved=0> # Some data Originator

nl:object                           <https://permid.org/1-987654321&gt;<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpermid.org%2F1-987654321%3E&data=02%7C01%7Cbenedict.whittamsmith%40refinitiv.com%7C04395ec9ca794f714cfb08d863c3715c%7C71ad2f6261e244fc9e8586c2827f6de9%7C0%7C0%7C637369038355082742&sdata=K7Xo%2F7DOci89PPQdCQbFld3qa9MtCr3ASrESu9VSdJE%3D&reserved=0> # Some data Consumer

odrl:action                       md:Invoice  .



*       Using these terms and pointing them to specific entity identifiers will allow code enforcing permissions to clearly identify each party and their role in any give Action. But, these generic terms are not sufficient if we want to surface a digital contract in a meaningful way to humans. So, for each Action, we'll give guidance on what are typical replacement terms so that implementations of ODRL-parsing applications can render "subject" and "object" as something more meaningful to the Action.



Ben has updated the Report action definition accordingly: https://w3c.github.io/market-data-odrl-profile/md-odrl-profile.html#report<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fw3c.github.io%2Fmarket-data-odrl-profile%2Fmd-odrl-profile.html%23report&data=02%7C01%7Cbenedict.whittamsmith%40refinitiv.com%7C04395ec9ca794f714cfb08d863c3715c%7C71ad2f6261e244fc9e8586c2827f6de9%7C0%7C0%7C637369038355092733&sdata=nermBj%2Fy64xsvRO4KJgFj%2B3ZQkSt8zmjZlPUPSuoZLA%3D&reserved=0>



The editor's note declares that: The Party making the report (i.e. the Subject of the Duty) is called the Reporting Party; the Party receiving the report (i.e. the Object) is known as the Reportee Party.



We left the breakout session with one important loose end: How strictly should the Action-specific replacement terms be defined in the spec? One point of view is that it be kept loosely defined so that it won't require as much effort to keep the spec current. Another perspective is that the language more strictly define the Subject and Object for each type of Action for greater consistency.


We can spend a few minutes on this this week, and continue the discussion in a second breakout session if desired.

Best regards,
Mark



Mark Bird | DataBP
14 Wall Street, Suite 4C
New York, NY 10005
Telephone: 917-257-5519
mark@databp.com<mailto:mark@databp.com>

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