Work Process

Technical work within the Content Reference Forum (CRF) is conducted in accordance with the forum's Technical Work Policy.

CRF's technical work is performed within Working Groups. Each Working Group is established by the Board of Governors for a specific goal and assigned a workplan. Workplans are established on an annual basis and revised as agreed by the membership. A Working Group must have at least 3 Principal Members. Most of the Working Groups currently meet bi-weekly using teleconferences, with the bulk of the technical work conducted using e-mail reflectors. Face-to-face plenaries are conducted as needed, typically once every 4 to 6 months.

Working Groups operate by consensus. If a vote is required and a quorum is present , resolutions can be passed by a simple majority except for specification acceptance, which requires a 2/3 majority.

A Joint Coordination Committee oversees all technical work to ensure synchronization of the work across all groups. The JCC consists of chairs of working groups and other members appointed by the Board.

In general, the work of a WG is centered around creating specifications and proceeds through the following steps:

• Requirements definition
• Use case/user scenarios definition
• Evaluation of existing standards
• Resolve technical issues (ongoing)
• Develop Working Group Draft specifications, and propose CRF Draft Specifications.

CRF has defined Specification development and adoption process with the following steps:

• Working Group draft(s) specifications, iterated within the WG
• CRF Draft Specification - a WG draft that has been approved by the WG and the JCC. The approved CRF Draft Specification is frozen and used by the WG for test/validation with test cases if required.  It is also distributed to the CRF Members for review and comment
• CRF Candidate Specification - a CRF Draft Specification that has been approved by a 2/3  majority vote of the Principal Members
• CRF Specification - a CRF Candidate Specification that has been subjected to public review and approved for publication as a final CRF Specification by a 2/3 majority vote of the CRF Principal Members.

Current Working Groups

Presently, the Board has chartered four Working Groups: Requirements and Architecture, Content References, Contracts Expression Language, and Reference Services.  The Requirements and Architecture group describes and maintains the vision of the overall system's architecture and drives selection of profiles, specifications and design policies. The Content References group develops requirements and specifications for the data formats in the CR architecture. The objective of the Contracts Expression Language group is to develop a formal language for expressing the contractual agreements between value chain participants within the Content Reference Framework in an unambiguous, interoperable, and machine interpretable manner.  The electronic contractual agreements are applied to Content References by specialized web services called Reference Services, which are being defined  by the Reference Services group.

The Direction of the Work

CRF is a pragmatic organization that focuses on practical aspects of building commercial systems for content distribution compliant with the overall Content Reference framework. Its goal is to select (and only when necessary create) and use the most appropriate standards available and to integrate them using demonstrable commercial experiments. The first experimentation is planned for Q1, 2004.

In keeping with its stated goal of leveraging appropriate standards developed elsewhere, CRF is referencing specifications for messaging, service description and discovery, content identification and description, rights expression and licensing, security reference standards, etc. from such organizations as MPEG, W3C, WS-I, OASIS, etc. We are also working to harmonize the commerce part of our architecture into the UN/CEFACT Business Collaboration Framework (BCF) standards. Presently, there are only two distinct "new" specifications that CRF is developing: Content References (CR) data formats and Contracts Expression Language (CEL). CRF is looking to establish strong, complementary relationships with other organizations committed to growth of content distribution and electronic commerce. CRF has a formal liaison with MPEG and will be set up liaisons with other standards groups as needed.

CRF strives to establish interoperable guidelines for development of systems using multiple interrelated standards and specifications and working across different types of media and devices. To achieve that, CRF is relying on a concept of "Profiles". A Profile is simply a set of constrained specifications that are chosen to work together to achieve a specific set of solutions. The first chartered profile is the "Baseline Profile" for interaction of software agents on Internet-enabled computer-based platforms. The Baseline Profile is also intended as the specification for interoperability between different usage domains. The initial release of the Baseline Profile set of specifications is targeted for December 10, 2003.

The major technical deliverables for 2003 are:

• Baseline Profile Version 1.0. This is an integrative specification that consists of a list of referenced specifications at specific version levels and guidelines. Baseline Profile will address operation of Internet-enabled computer-based platforms. Version 1.0 will address specifications for messaging, services description and discovery, content references, rights expressions, contract expressions, and client-to-reference service protocol
• Content Reference Core Format Specification Version 1.0 and Content Reference Baseline Profile Format Specification Version 1.0. To ensure future adaptability, Content Reference specification is constructed in a modular manner, referencing a number of "point" specifications that can evolve with standards in other standards bodies. In addition to the content reference data formats, this set of specifications will address content identification, content description, and offers and licenses
• Contracts Expression Language Specification Version 1.0 (Working Draft) and Contracts Expression Language Extension for the Baseline Profile