Distributed Active Relationships in the Warwick Framework

This paper extends our work on the Warwick Framework a container architecture for multiple metadata packages that might be associated with a common resource. Since we believe that metadata is only “meta” in relation to other resources, we have generalized the framework to allow containers to hold or reference any sort of resource, not just those normally considered as metadata. Second, since such a view of metadata emphasizes the role of the relations between datasets, we describe a method of naming those relationships and defining their semantics. By making the relationships first-class resources in their own right, we can identify them, fetch them from the network if necessary, and even execute them. The result is a flexible architecture we refer to as Distributed Active Relationships. We describe the use of this architecture in a digital library context by using distributed active relationships to specify how a resource may be accessed and the restrictions on that access.