Re: Suggestions from iAnnotate Conference

Thanks for the summary Rob. I really enjoyed iAnnotate as well.
Hopefully there will be one again next year.

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl> wrote:
> On the license rights I strongly suggest to keep it just as the issue of
> "creator" is handled right now at
> http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/core.html#Provenance
> I.e., implementers are encouraged to attch some property that reflects the
> creator, and to do so using existing vocabularies like Dublin Core.
>
> If you propose a specific solution for rights in the spec, then I don't see
> why we could avoid presenting a solution for creator and a couple of other
> properties, which are even more important than rights.

Isn't the whole point of Open Annotation to help build a Web where
annotations are shared, and used outside of the individual systems
they currently live in? For this to work in any meaningful way a
responsible Web publisher really needs to know if they can display an
annotation. In practice Web publishers will probably have out of band
agreements about what annotation sources they use in their
services/products, and what degree of legal fuzziness they are
comfortable with.

But it would be a Good Thing to encourage annotation publishers and
authors to think about how they want their annotations to be used on
the Web, and for them to make an explicit statement about it in their
annotation data. Deferring to a named graph or assertion in an RDF
dump seems like obscure advice at best. I would prefer to see a simple
example and a little nudge (w/ a SHOULD) in the OA spec, similar to
what is done for annotation creators. To be clear, I don't think we
should nudge them towards using a particular license, but just to
encourage them to have one, and be clear about the one they are using.

When the Creative Commons looked at dc:rights use on the Web [1] they
found it to be "fraught with confusion and misunderstanding". They
chose to create a new property cc:license which is a sub-property of
dcterms:license. I would like to see the OA specification do
similarly, and encourage the use of dcterms:license and cc:license
where appropriate. Think of it as a small thing to do for the memory
of Aaron Swartz, and an important thing for open annotations on the
Web.

//Ed

[1] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Extend_Metadata#Defining_dc:rights

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2013 09:09:08 UTC