Re: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up

"Is that bad? For Linked Data to be useful, you need to be able to mix 
and share.". Sorry but that's simply not true. For it to be useful *to 
you*, perhaps, but (Closed) Linked Data still has massive value as a 
technology and not all data should or can be fully open!

Linking and Openness are two unrelated, but great, things to do but you 
can do them independently. There is still value in data which is Linked 
but not entirely or even slightly open.

Open is the gold standard, but it's not the only form of Linked Data. 
There's a massive value to companies to produce Linked Intranets which 
will link and use open data from outside, but certainly not be open.

At the heart of our university are lectures. From a Linked data 
perspective, these are a motherlode of linkage. A lecture is the nexus 
point joining: A room, eg. <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/room/59-1257> 
with a lecturer, eg. <http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/60> with a number 
of students, with the URI of a Module 
<http://data.southampton.ac.uk/module/COMP1004/2010-2011.html> and the 
specific instance of that module 
<http://id.southampton.ac.uk/module-instance/10622/2010-2011> and 
resources for that lecture 
<http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/455> . However, unlike most of 
our other data, it would take a huge policy decision to make this 
information freely available, but I can still make it available in a 
closed form to a student or staff member, upon authentication, which 
means that they can still have it on an iphone app / google calendar etc.

Linked is a technology.
Open is an ideology.

As previously suggested, I think it would aid understanding to award 
stars for the use of the technology, but only gold stars if you use an 
open license otherwise people will get *nothing* for getting the data 
out while they try to arrange a license.

Right now <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/eprints> is technically 
should get ZERO stars as it's very complex to work out what license we 
have the right to use. Some of the abstracts of papers may legally 
belong to publishers and it may be OK for us to publish and distribute 
tham as data, but not to grant licenses on something we don't own. This 
dataset is on two journeys, one ends with an open license (silver to 
gold), one with it getting fully linked into the data web (* to *****). 
They converge at the heady heights of 5 gold-star fully linked and open 
data.

Egon Willighagen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 10:03 PM, Martin Hepp
> <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:
>   
>>> ★     Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open licence
>>>       
>> I fear that the "open" requirement as the entrance gate for the star schema means that e-commerce data will be excluded.
>>
>> Most providers of e-commerce data (offers, model data, images,...) will
>> - want to put some constraints on the usage of their data or
>> - cannot release the data under an open license because they are bound by their licensing conditions to the actual creator of the page.
>>     
>
> Is that bad? For Linked Data to be useful, you need to be able to mix
> and share. You need to be able to fix and redistribute. The 'open'
> nature for LOD is for me the difference between LOD and LD... let this
> closed e-commerce data be happy in the LD world, not?
>
> Dear Tim,
>
> may I request some clarification on what kind of 'Open' you are
> referring to in the first star? Is this the Open Knowledge Foundation
> kind of Open, which excludes the Non-Commercial clause (as on CKAN)?
> Or is that allowed, and to only modification and redistribution matter
> to you? Or perhaps you do have a completely different view on these
> things.
>
> Egon
>
>   

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/