Re: There's No Money in Linked Data

Hi Pascal,

Its good to draw attention to these issues. At ISWC 2009 Tom Heath,
Kaitlin Thaney, Jordan Hatcher and myself ran a workshop a legal and
social issues for data sharing [1, 2]. Key themes from the workshop
were around the importance of clear licensing, norms for attribution,
and including machine-readable license data.

At the time I did a survey of the current state of licensing of the
Linked Data cloud, there's a write-up [3] and diagram [4].

Looking over your analysis, I don't think the picture has changed
considerably since then. We need to work harder to ensure that data is
clearly licensed. But this is a general problem for Open Data, not
just Linked Open Data.

You don't say in your paper how you did the analysis. Did you use the
metadata from the LOD group in datahub? [5]. At the time I had to do
mine manually, but it wouldn't be hard to automate some of this now,
perhaps to create an regularly updated set of indicators.

One criteria that agents might apply when conducting "Follow Your
Nose" consumption of Linked Data is the licensing of the target data,
e.g. ignore links to datasets that are not licensed for your
particular usage.

Cheers,

L.

[1]. http://opendatacommons.org/events/iswc-2009-legal-social-sharing-data-web/
[2]. http://blog.okfn.org/2009/11/05/slides-from-open-data-session-at-iswc-2009/
[3]. http://blog.ldodds.com/2010/01/01/rights-statements-on-the-web-of-data/
[4]. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ldodds/4043803502/
[5]. http://datahub.io/group/lodcloud

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 3:15 AM, Pascal Hitzler
<pascal.hitzler@wright.edu> wrote:
> We just finished a piece indicating serious legal issues regarding the
> commercialization of Linked Data - this may be of general interest, hence
> the post. We hope to stimulate discussions on this issue (hence the
> provokative title).
>
> Available from
> http://knoesis.wright.edu/faculty/pascal/pub/nomoneylod.pdf
>
> Abstract.
> Linked Data (LD) has been an active research area for more than 6 years and
> many aspects about publishing, retrieving, linking, and cleaning Linked Data
> have been investigated. There seems to be a broad and general agreement that
> in principle LD datasets can be very useful for solving a wide variety of
> problems ranging from practical industrial analytics to highly specific
> research problems. Having these notions in mind, we started exploring the
> use of notable LD datasets such as DBpedia, Freebase, Geonames and others
> for a commercial application. However, it turns out that using these
> datasets in realistic settings is not always easy. Surprisingly, in many
> cases the underlying issues are not technical but legal barriers erected by
> the LD data publishers. In this paper we argue that these barriers are often
> not justified, detrimental to both data publishers and users, and are often
> built without much consideration of their consequences.
>
> Authors:
> Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Chitra Venkatramani
>
> --
> Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
> Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
> pascal@pascal-hitzler.de   http://www.knoesis.org/pascal/
> Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
> Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net
>
>



-- 
Leigh Dodds
Freelance Technologist
Open Data, Linked Data Geek
t: @ldodds
w: ldodds.com
e: leigh@ldodds.com

Received on Saturday, 18 May 2013 08:58:52 UTC