Remove "Customer Reviews" field

Open Know-Where IOP-OKW Change Proposals
1

Current wording

4.26. Customer Reviews

Definition: Customer reviews of the facility.

Format: Free text.

Permalink

https://standards.internetofproduction.org/pub/okw#customer-reviews

Proposal

The proposal is to remove this section altogether

Motivation

There are a number of reasons for not having this field in the spec, including:

  • From a technical perspective, reviews are not implemented as a single fields, as there needs to be provision for multiple reviews for a facility
  • From a legal perspective having reviews in a database can open the reviewer and the platform to liabilities (e.g. libel or defamation) in certain jurisdictions

Risks

I don’t think that there are any risks of removing this field from the spec. If anything removing it reduces risk.

As it is currently defined, it’s not useable to build review functionality anyway. If a particular platform wants to implement review functionality based on an OKW dataset, then that they would still be able to do so by linking their reviewer data to the facility records internally. Not having it in the spec does not prevent this.

2

I understand your point about it not being implementable so in that case I would support removing it - but then could we mention in the standard how people can do this if they want to? (Could be as simple as saying what you said above “If a particular platform wants to implement review functionality based on an OKW dataset, then that they would still be able to do so by linking their reviewer data to the facility records internally”