Re: LOD Data Sets, Licensing, and AWS

Hi all,

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>wrote:

> All,
>
> As you may have noticed, AWS still haven't made the LOD cloud data sets  --
> that I submitted eons ago -- public. Basically, the hold-up comes down to
> discomfort with the lack of license clarity re. some of the data sets.
>
> Action items for all data set publishers:
>
> 1. Integrate your data set licensing into your data set (for LOD I would
> expect CC-BY-SA to be the norm)


Please do not use CC-BY-SA for LOD - it is not an appropriate licence and it
is making the problem worse. That licence uses copyright which does not hold
for factual information.

Please use an Open Data Commons license or CC-0

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0

If your dataset contains copyrighted material too (e.g. reviews) and you
hold the rights over that content then you should also apply a standard
copyright licence. So for completeness you need a licence for your data and
one for your content. If you use CC-0 you can apply it to both at the same
time. Obviously if you aren't the rightsholder (e.g. it is scraped
data/content from someone else) then you can't just slap any licence you
like on it - you have to abide by the original rightsholder's wishes.

Personally I would try and select a public domain waiver or dedication, not
one that requires attributon. The reason can be seen at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license#UC_Berkeley_advertising_clausewhere
stacking of attributions becomes a huge burden. Having datasets
require attribution will negate one of the linked data web's greatest
strengths: the simplicity of remixing and reusing data.

A group of us have submitted a tutorial on these issues for ISWC 2009,
hopefully it will get accepted because this is a really important area of
Linked Data that is poorly understood.


>
> 2. Indicate license terms in the appropriate column at:
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/DataSetRDFDumps
>
> If licenses aren't clear I will have to exclude offending data sets from
> the AWS publication effort.
>

I completely support declaring what rights are asserted or waived for a
dataset, so please everyone help this effort.

Ian