Re: attaching multiple licenses

Keith Alexander wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:40:28 -0000, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>
>> A better solution might be to publish your data in a format that can
>> make use of multiple graphs. e.g. in N3:
>>
>
>> Unfortunately, most of the data formats with native support for named
>> graphs do not have very good support in consuming software. But you can
>
>
> Could one option be to use Toby and Kjetil's Named Graphs in RDFa 
> (“RDFa Quads”)[1] ? Then at least the DOM (and perhaps the browser's 
> rendering of it) can make explicit what data comes from where, and how 
> it is licensed, while regular RDFa triple parsers can still get at the 
> triples unimpeded. You could attach a rights statement to the document 
> explaining what you've done, and how subsequent consumers should take 
> notice of the relevant licenses as appropriate.
>
> It doesn't make it easy for hypothetical use cases of 
> license-sensitive  consumption & republication, but I suppose the 
> answer to this thorny problem is social (get data publishers to forgo 
> placing these license-hurdles on their would-be data-consumers?) 
> rather than technical?
>
> It just seems that, if you were to produce some kind of dynamic  
> mesh-up application that consumed data from arbitrary sources, it 
> would be quite hard to design it to do the "right" thing with regards 
> to licenses/waivers/copyright.
>
> Lots of linked data is published with no explicit rights statement - 
> do they all need one? Do I need one for my foaf file?
> Lots of data is published with licenses not applicable to data (only 
> to 'creative works') - should the license be ignored, or the 
> publisher's intentions be respected ?
> If so, what (as Georgi is asking) are the acceptable ways of 
> republishing  data merged from different sources with different rights 
> requirements?  I'm not sure that Tom's solution to not duplicate 
> triples in the RDF view is wholly sufficient because the licenses 
> still ask for attribution and license reproduction, which still apply 
> however you republish the data, don't they? Also, as has already been 
> said, the merging can involve useful data cleaning/smushing/etc work 
> that deserves republication.
>
> Do licenses requiring  attribution give any guidance about how that 
> attribution should be given in a mash-up/mesh-up scenario?
>
> How SHOULD attribution be given? I have seen Kingsley argue a few 
> times that simply reusing a dbpedia URI is sufficient attribution to 
> dbpedia. While this is appealing, is this the intention of the data 
> publishers (if you asked wikipedia and/or dbpedia and/or freebase, 
> would they agree?) ?  Moreover, doesn't this mean you HAVE to mint 
> your own URIs if you want attribution for data you are giving about 
> something ? (ie, if I publish some additional facts about 
> dbpedia:Berlin, if you republish them, the dbpedia:Berlin URI does not 
> give me any attribution.)
>
> All this confusion about how linked data can be used is really strange 
> given that RDF is explicitly designed as a model for distributed data 
> that can easily be merged. It wouldn't seem totally crazy to think the 
> default assumption would be that if someone publishes RDF, they want 
> people to reuse it and merge it with other RDF...
>
>
> Anyway, I think that any publishers of linked data that want to place 
> some restrictions on how their data is reused, should provide clearer 
> guidelines on the technical solutions to fulfilling those 
> requirements. Maybe if they thought about it and realised how 
> confusing it all is, they'd decide they didn't really want to restrict 
> reuse that much in the first place.
>
>
>
> Keith
>
>
> [1] http://buzzword.org.uk/2009/rdfa4/spec
>
>
>
Keith,


Yes, I still stand by my case for HTTP URIs as implicit vehicles of 
Attribution.

I certainly owe everyone a detailed post about the new Attribution 
driven Economy that I believe Linked Data enables, with some practical 
real world examples etc.

In the meantime, do listen to this podcast interview between Jon Udell 
and Martin Hepp. Towards the last quarter of the podcast Jon & Martin 
hone into the power of HTTP URIs as vehicles of Identifying Units of 
contribution within an economic value chain.

Links:

1. http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4312.html

-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen       Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 12:16:39 UTC