Hi, We had a short discussion on the term "ownership" today. In 2006, a few colleagues (Bas van Oudenaarde and Leon Gommans) and I had the same problem and read a few standards (TMN one of them as I recall), and came up with these definitions. This was published in 2007, http://staff.science.uva.nl/~fdijkstr/publications/controlmodels.pdf ================================================================ Owner, Administrator and Users. We distinguish between legal owner, economic owner, administrator and user(s) for each network element. The legal owner of a network element is the entity that purchased the device and the economic owner is the entity that acquired the usage rights from the legal owner. We base these terms on current practice in economic and legal communities. The economic owner determines the policy of the network element. This entity carries the responsibility for the behavior of a device and has the final responsibility in case of hazards and abuse. In addition, each network element can also have a separate administrator, the person, organization, or software component that configures and administers the device on behalf of the economic owner. The economic owner determines the policy for a network element; the administrator enforces this policy. Finally, the users may use or invoke an element, if their request is in compliance with the active policy. ================================================================ The only thing I would change todays is to avoid the word "administrator" due to its ambiguity and use the word "operator" instead (which in fact was in an earlier draft of this paper). Regards, Freek