The InterParty project was funded under the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme (IST), to design and specify a network to support interoperability of party identification (for both natural and corporate names) across different domains. InterParty built on the work of the project, one of whose deliverables was a specification for a Directory of Parties. InterParty was not proposed as a replacement for existing schemes for the identification of participants in the intellectual property domain (e.g. national library name authority files or systems oriented towards the needs of rights licensing) but as a means of effecting their interoperation.

Who benefited from InterParty?

Collecting societies, performer databases, national libraries, bibliographic agencies all have the need to disambiguate between different parties who share the same name and to be aware of the same party using different names. These may be authors, composers, performers, producers, directors, publishers, imprints, record labels, libraries, academic institutions etc.

Not only is this task difficult, time-consuming and costly, it is often repeated by other organisations attempting to identify the same parties for different purposes.

What were InterParty's goals?

Building on the work of the project, InterParty designed, specified and developed the blueprint for a network that provided participating agencies with a means of online, on-demand, checking of identities - a virtual Directory of Parties - and enabled party identifiers to be mapped automatically between domains.

Interparty Runtime

The project started on April 2002 and finished at the end of June 2003.

An important part of InterParty's work was to develop a business model and governance proposals for the continuing operation of the network. It is envisaged that InterParty will develop into a closed network of organisations supporting identification schemes. Members of the network will hope to achieve a common cost and quality benefit from collaboration and interoperability.

What will happen with this site?

We are not Interparty, we are not EDItEUR and we're not the European Union. When InterParty decided not to continue hosting this site we decided to step in and keep it alive, including some extra resources on related subjects. If you would like to add to this site, contact us - and we might be able to accept your submission.

We want to point out that we're here to inform. We see this small site as a teaching tool, nothing more, nothing less. We don't claim copyright to the presentations or any of the restored content.