Re: [dxwg] ID25 to be revised (#9)

@jpullmann My opinion was that in some environments the attachment of licences and rights to metadata, e.g restricting copying, correcting, enriching, is considered to be problematic. Even attribution of the metadata could seriously affect re-use. A main issue is that, in RDF, 'metadata' is not a singular thing as it consists of a set of 'statements' (subject predicate object). So, to be able to satisfy any licensing arrangement, one might need to keep track of provenance and licence information for each and every statement. The case of "you may not copy" is easy: that's probably a catalogue-wide restriction and a harvester will just go away and not include anything from the catalogue at hand. Other types of licences are more problematic. Let's imagine a situation that a harvester copies a set of statements from a source and then adds some statements that reflect an interest from its audience, e.g. additional subjects, or automatic translations of textual information. In case of a "keep in sync" licence, does the original source really want all of the new fields added by the second source to be copied back? How do these changes get transmitted? Does the original source now need to attribute the additional statements to the second source? Another situation could occur with "attribution" licences in chained harvesting, e.g. a regional catalogue harvested by a domain-specific aggregator which is then harvested by a general aggregator -- a situation that occurs in the European DCAT-AP network -- where each aggregator adds some fields. This gets complicated very quickly: what is attributed to whom? 
In summary, while it would be simple to add `dct:license` to `dcat:CatalogRecord`, I think the operational consequences are difficult to describe.
On the other hand, I know that Europeana suggests an interesting mix of CC0 for metadata plus attribution, CC0+BY ([here ](https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/rights/metadata.html) and also [here](https://dancohen.org/2013/11/26/cc0-by/)), so maybe @aisaac can shed some light on the practical issues around this?


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Received on Monday, 4 March 2019 10:36:19 UTC