multiple infrastructure providers on one network - document guidance workaround

[odscjen]

There's increasing evidence of the need to accommodate instances where 2 or more organisations are in a partnership to build a network and therefore all qualify as physicalInfrastructureProvider. This has previously been discussed in https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/open-fibre-data-standard/issues/199 and https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/open-fibre-data-standard/issues/210.

In the case where the partnership is incorporated as a single entity this is not an issue as that entity can be the one given as the physicalInfrastructureProvider, but when they are not the schema as is doesn't accommodate this.

Potential changes to the schema are being discussed in the linked issues but until they can be made there's the potential to come up with some short-term workaround and document that in the non-normative guidance.

A suggestion is for the data publisher to create a 'virtual' organisation, i.e. create one, to represent the partnership and use this in the physicalInfrastructureProvider field.

An obvious issue with this is as this will be a virtual organisation, and not exist outside of the dataset it will not be possible to link it to any other data.

[duncandewhurst]

There's also some relevant discussion and examples from https://github.com/Open-Telecoms-Data/open-fibre-data-standard/issues/192#issuecomment-2072338573 onwards.