Curator Principles
Public commitments for those who curate.
What Curators Do
Curators add third-party perspective to venue self-descriptions. They confirm existence, capture stories, and provide the regional context that individual venues cannot claim for themselves.
Curation is work. Someone has to visit, interview, verify, and maintain. That work creates value.
What Curators Are Not
Curators are not gatekeepers.
A venue does not need Curator approval to publish a Venue record. Any venue can be discovered, understood, and booked by AI agents directly. Curator verification adds weight to evidence; it does not grant permission to exist.
Multiple Curators Can Exist
The specifications support unlimited Curators. They can overlap, compete, and disagree.
| Scale | Example |
|---|---|
| Regional | A DMO curating 500 venues in their area |
| National | A tourism board curating 10,000 |
| Global | An operator curating 10 million |
| Niche | A specialist guide curating 50 with deep expertise |
All are valid. Agents choose how to weight them based on coverage, freshness, accuracy, and relevance to the query.
Curators Can Disagree
Two Curators may tell different stories about the same venue. One may verify claims another disputes. This is expected, not a defect.
The specifications define no single source of truth. Convergence across independent Curators increases confidence. Divergence signals uncertainty. Agents handle both.
Curation Criteria Should Be Public
Curators should publish:
- What kinds of evidence they consider
- How they assess freshness
- How they handle conflicts
- How venues can request correction
This makes curation legible. Venues and agents can understand why decisions were made.
Power and Accountability
Large-scale curation creates structural advantage. A Curator with 10 million verified venues will be weighted differently than one with 50. This is unavoidable.
Open standards do not eliminate power asymmetries. They make them legible, contestable, and accountable.
Open Standards
The specifications remain open and implementable by anyone.
Published Criteria
Curation criteria are published, not hidden.
Competition
Alternative Curators can emerge and compete.
Correction Paths
Venues can challenge incorrect information.
Disputes and Corrections
Venues should have a path to dispute Curator claims. Curators should publish:
- How to request review
- Expected response timeframes
- Escalation paths
Curation without correction mechanisms is assertion, not verification.
Stewardship, Not Ownership
Those who maintain the largest deployments have a responsibility to ensure the standards remain grounded in reality. Real-world implementation surfaces edge cases, ambiguities, and failure modes that specifications alone cannot anticipate.
This is stewardship: using scale to stress-test and improve shared infrastructure, not to capture it.
Discovery Should Be Open
The Curator Index—how agents discover which Curators exist—is critical infrastructure. Whoever controls the index controls discovery.
The specifications do not define who operates the Curator Index. But they establish expectations for how indexes should behave.
Index operators SHOULD:
- Accept any Curator that meets published inclusion criteria
- Publish those criteria publicly
- Allow agents to query without gatekeeping
- Not favour their own Curators over competitors
Multiple indexes can exist. Agents can query several. No single index should have monopoly control over which Curators are discoverable.
The same principles that apply to Curators—transparency, accountability, contestability—apply to index operators.
Summary
- Curators add value through work, not gatekeeping
- Multiple Curators can exist and compete
- Curators can disagree; agents resolve conflicts
- Curation criteria should be public
- Power asymmetries should be legible and contestable
- Disputes need clear correction paths
- Scale confers responsibility, not ownership
- Discovery infrastructure should be open and plural
These principles apply to all Curators and index operators.