Glossary · Administrative metadata

iiRDS Party

Also known as: parties and roles, party role, responsible party

In iiRDS (intelligent information Request and Delivery Standard), a Party is a person, organization or system associated with a resource. Each Party must have a role (iirds:has-party-role), such as author, manufacturer or supplier, and a vCard description of itself (iirds:relates-to-vcard).

iiRDS term
Ontology
Information architecture

In one sentence

An iiRDS Party names a person, organization or system with its role — author, manufacturer, supplier, inspector — described with a vCard.

Example

A component “Rotor” names its manufacturer as a Party with the role iirds:Manufacturer and a vCard organization “My Company of Europe Ltd.”

How it applies

Where parties appear: A Party can be linked with iirds:relates-to-party to information units, content lifecycle statuses, components, product variants and identity domains — the author of a topic, the performer of an approval, the manufacturer of a component or the custodian of an ID system.
Roles: iiRDS defines the party roles Author, Creator, Contributor, Customer, Inspector, Manufacturer, PerformedBy and Supplier. The party itself is described with the W3C vCard vocabulary, for example vcard:Organization or vcard:Individual.
Supply chain and handover: In iiRDS/H, parties are mandatory: every package names its creator, every document its author, every product identity its manufacturer.
AI governance: Parties make responsibility machine-readable. An AI system can cite not only the source text but also who authored and who approved it.

Party role vs. qualification role

iirds:PartyRole describes who is responsible for a resource (author, manufacturer). iirds:Role, part of functional metadata, describes who is qualified to carry out a task (service technician). A reviewer is a party; a technician is a qualification.

In RDF

Adapted from the manufacturer example in the iiRDS specification. Shown in Turtle for readability — inside a package, metadata.rdf is written in RDF/XML.

@prefix iirds: <http://iirds.tekom.de/iirds#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix vcard: <http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#> .

<https://example.com/iirds/products/rotor> a iirds:Component ;
    rdfs:label "Rotor"@en ;
    iirds:relates-to-party [
        a iirds:Party ;
        iirds:has-party-role iirds:Manufacturer ;
        iirds:relates-to-vcard [
            a vcard:Organization ;
            vcard:fn "My Company of Europe Ltd." ;
            vcard:organization-name "My Company"
        ]
    ] .