The following question(s) were asked in the Collection Management Systems Webinar and will be answered here.
David Shorthouse: Recommendation: The new world for collections management systems is linking to concepts held outside their walls. I saw objectEntityID and externalObjectEntityID as one accommodation for this new world, perhaps with a nod to openDS. But, I also recommend that evidence, assertions, & attribution for this local ID <=> external ID be considered because these associations are rarely absolute & require verification/re-verification.
Response:
In my first reading I understand the suggestion as to be able to accommodate annotations on top of what is aggregated from data publishers. Though that too is very interesting as an extension of what we’re doing in this project, I think you are suggesting being able to document why a relationship is believed to exist - that an EntityRelationship is another, special kind of Assertion, one that relates two Entities.
We can already cover Assertions about the relationship (with an EntityRelationshipAssertions table), and if that isn’t enough to cover the attributions (with the entityRelationshipAssertionByAgentID property), then an EntityRelationshipAgentRole could also be added to cover this in even further depth and specificity.