Consider complementing A2A Agent Card and MCP Server Card, instead of partially redefining them

[Fannon]

First let me state that I really value this initiative to create a shared discovery / description layer between A2A and MCP. I think this will make integration between the ecosystem much more streamlined, especially for MCP where this is not yet defined well enough.

Short background: I'm the author of another Linux Foundation standard for metadata discovery, Open Resource Discovery (ORD) which also addresses similar concerns, I think. But I don't want to talk you into it, because it's scope goes clearly beyond AI metadata discovery. I understand that AI Cards has a nice scope fit to the AI ecosystem.

But here are some ideas I'd like to put out there:

First, I'm not sure if we really need / should redefine the AI card format for both MCP and A2A, with a shared layer and then embedding protocol specifics. This leads to problems what to cut out / change and keeping this in sync. What ORD does is basically splitting this into a 3 step discovery: First the .well-known/ URI, from where you find the actual documents / URLs and the capabilities of the discovery protocol. Second, the "shared layer", which only has the metadata that we want to describe consistently between the different protocols and formats. And then third, the actual resource definition which is a link to the original standard metadata format, e.g. A2A Agent Card - or when that comes, MCP Server Card.

This has the advantage that the ownership of the Card metadata files stays with the protocols and follows also their own lifecycle. Also it means that A2A and MCP can be described with their own format, without coupling this to a discovery standard. The discovery standard then only needs to define what's common between the protocols and how to get the detailed standard metadata.

This is why I think we should probably still have a MCP defined, independent MCP Server Card format that maybe also could be discovered as MCP resource directly, too. It decouples the various standards and an adopter can choose how much of this they need.

Thanks for your work! I'm aware that this proposal would change things structurally and understand that there are many ways to go forward. Just wanted to put out another take on it.