Transfer of agent-resource-relationship
From yesterday's walk'n'talk, this idea introduced by @bhaugen , who should feel free to add to or clarify anything here.
The idea is to encapsulate the rights and responsibilities concept in the agent-resource relationship. For some cases, this is instead of a resource in its own right with an underlying resource. Could reference any amount of formal definition, like a lease agreement or deed or whatever. But the vocabulary would only model that relationship, not all the complex possibilities of the rights and responsibilities. (Which we were never going to do anyway.)
Part of this is to try to make this flexible enough to get into a coordination focus over an ownership focus. Like what can happen with this resource on different relationships. An example in the current system is maybe I can sublet the apartment but not sell it.
So a vf:Transfer could transfer an agent-resource-relationship from one agent to another. We would need the ability to define agent-resource-relationship types. I think there will be a lot of variations there, and users will want to be able to define their own.
Remaining issues I can think of right now:
- I don't think this addresses Services very well, which our old definition of "transfer of rights" didn't either. We'll need to look at that more.
- Not only does the agent change, the resource might change. This gets entangled with the ongoing discussion of what defines vf:Resource and what can identify a resource in different situations. Teasing out the model for vf:Resource will affect the agent-resource-relationship, I think.
- I don't think this necessarily gets completely rid of the underlying resource idea, unless we can make this work for virtual accounts, which I don't think we can. I think all relationships to a resource are of the same amount, which is the amount on the resource itself. Or maybe not, I start to see some possibilities....