OWG

Trust and Stewardship

Purpose

OWG depends on trust.

Identifiers are useful only if people believe they are durable, unambiguous within their authority, and governed responsibly.

Reconciliation is useful only if people can understand how conclusions were reached, which sources were used, and who participated in the decision.

Trust Is Earned

OWG should not ask users, librarians, archivists, publishers, or software systems to trust it by default.

OWG should earn trust through:

• Durable identifier policy
• Transparent provenance
• Public discussion
• Attributable stewardship
• Clear distinction between source assertions and OWG reconciliation
• Clear distinction between global authority and local authority

Source Assertions

Sources provide assertions.

Examples include:

• ISBN registries
• DOI records
• Wikidata entities
• Open Library records
• Publisher metadata
• Library catalogs
• Institutional repositories
• Local Item Servers

OWG should preserve source identity and provenance when consuming assertions.

OWG should not collapse disagreement into false certainty.

Stewardship

Stewardship is the process by which OWG participants review assertions, reconcile identities, resolve disagreements, and improve mappings.

Stewardship should be collaborative, public, and evidence-based.

OWG stewards do not own knowledge.

OWG stewards maintain the shared identity and reconciliation layer.

Authority

OWG authority is scoped.

Globally managed OWG identifiers are governed by the OWG namespace.

Locally managed Item identifiers are governed by the local authority that issued them.

This distinction allows OWG to provide shared identity without taking ownership of local holdings, inventory, access rules, lending, licensing, or availability.

Disagreement

Disagreement is expected.

Sources may disagree with one another.

Stewards may disagree with one another.

OWG should preserve enough provenance and history for consumers to understand the basis of a reconciliation decision.

Where possible, OWG should contribute corrections and improvements back to upstream systems.

Resolver Trust

The public resolver is the canonical publication point for OWG reconciliation outcomes.

Alternative resolvers may exist, but they do not supersede the canonical OWG position unless governance explicitly changes the canonical authority.

The resolver is trusted because the OWG community and governance model make it trustworthy, not because of the software alone.

Design Test

A useful question for OWG proposals is:

Does this increase trust in OWG identity, reconciliation, or stewardship?

If not, it may be outside the core mission of the project.