indecs[1] (an acronym of "interoperability of data in e-commerce systems"; written in lower case) was a project partly funded by the European Community Info 2000 initiative and by several organisations representing the music, rights, text publishing, authors, library and other sectors in 1998–2000, which has since been used in a number of metadata activities.
indecs provided an analysis of the requirements for metadata for e-commerce of content (intellectual property) in the network environment, focusing on semantic interoperability.
So, for example, instead of treating sound carriers, books, videos and photographs as fundamentally different things with different (if similar) characteristics, they are all recognised as creations with different values of the same higher-level attributes, whose metadata can be supported in a common environment.
This led to a subsequent project, Interparty,[3] funded under the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme, to design and specify a network to support interoperability of party identification (for both natural and corporate names) across different domains, building on the indecs principles.
[4] indecs does not attempt to replace intellectual property rights law, though a specific set of legal elements might be included in an indecs-based structure, and the indecs framework specifically includes some definitions of intellectual property rights from major international treaties such as the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty.