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The DOI Foundation is one of the organizations which funded the original INDECS framework and has continued to develop it further in partnership with an increasing range of organizations. Originally, the challenge for the DOI/INDECS project was to create a genre-neutral framework among rights-holders for electronic intellectual property rights trading so that companies can trade their creations in a coherent single marketplace.

In the INDECS model, an item of metadata is defined as "a relationship that someone claims to exist between two entities". This definition stresses the significance of relationships, which lie at the heart of the INDECS work.

The principles of the INDECS model are:

•unique identification
Every entity must be uniquely defined within an identified namespace.

•functional granularity
It should be possible to identify an entity whenever it needs to be distinguished.

•designated authority
The creator of the metadata must be identified without doubts about its identity.

•application independence
The metadata schema should be independent of the technology used.

•appropriate access
Everyone must have access to the metadata needed. The consequence of this principle that not all metadata must be accessible to everyone. In certain circumstances, some metadata would be inaccessible for certain users.

For more information, see The INDECS Framework.