- From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:59:45 -0400
- To: Ian Davis <lists@iandavis.com>
- CC: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com>, public-lod@w3.org
Ian Davis wrote: > On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Kingsley Idehen > <kidehen@openlinksw.com <mailto:kidehen@openlinksw.com>> wrote: > > The NYT, London Times, and others of this ilk, are more likely to > contribute their quality data to the LOD cloud if they know there > is a vehicle (e.g., a license scheme) that ensures their HTTP URIs > are protected i.e., always accessible to user agents at the data > representation (HTML, XML, N3, RDF/XML, Turtle etc..) level; > thereby ensuring citation and attribution requirements are honored. > > > I agree with that, but it only covers a small portion of what is > needed. You fail to consider the situations where people publish data > about other people's URIs, as reviews or annotation. I am not, far from it. > The foaf:primaryTopic mechanism isn't strong enough if the publisher > requires full attribution for use of their data. If I use SPARQL to > extract a subset of reviews to display on my site then in all > likelihood I have lost that linkage with the publishing document. Only if you choose to construct your result document using literal values i.e., a SPARQL solution that has URIs filtered out; anyway, if thats what you end up doing, then you do have <link/> and @rel at your disposal for identifying your data sources, worst case. > > > > Attribution is the kind of thing one gives as the result of a > license requirement in exchange for permission to copy. In the > academic world for journal articles this doesn't come into play at > all, since there is no copying (in the usual case). Instead people > cite articles because the norms of their community demand it. > > Yes, and the HTTP URI ultimately delivers the kind mechanism I > believe most traditional media companies seek (as stated above). > They ultimately want people to use their data with low cost > citation and attribution intrinsic to the medium of value exchange. > > > The BBC is a traditional media company. Its data is licensed only for > personal, non-commercial use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/#3 I used New York Times and London Times for specific reasons, their business models are different from that of the BBC; they are traditional *commercial* media companies. > > > btw - how are you dealing with this matter re. the > nuerocommons.org <http://nuerocommons.org> linked data space? How > do you ensure your valuable work is fully credited as it bubbles > up the value chain? > > > I found this linked from the RDF Distribution page on neurocommons.org > <http://neurocommons.org> : > http://svn.neurocommons.org/svn/trunk/product/bundles/frontend/nsparql/NOTICES.txt > > Everyone should read it right now to appreciate the complexity of > aggregating data from many sources when they all have idiosyncratic > requirements of attribution. > > Then read > http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/ > to see how we should be approaching the licensing of data. It explains > in detail the motivations for things like CC-0 and PDDL which seek to > promote open access for all by removing restrictions: > > "Thus, to facilitate data integration and open access data sharing, > any implementation of this protocol MUST waive all rights necessary > for data extraction and re-use (including copyright, sui generis > database rights, claims of unfair competition, implied contracts, and > other legal rights), and MUST NOT apply any obligations on the user of > the data or database such as “copyleft” or “share alike”, or even the > legal requirement to provide attribution. Any implementation SHOULD > define a non-legally binding set of citation norms in clear, > lay-readable language." > > Science Commons have spent a lot of time and resources to come to this > conclusion, and they tried all kinds of alternatives such as > attribution and share alike licences (as did Talis). The final > consensus was that the public domain was the only mechanism that could > scale for the future. Without this kind of approach, aggregating, > querying and reusing the web of data will become impossibly complex. > This is a key motivation for Talis starting the Connected Commons > programme ( http://www.talis.com/platform/cc/ ). We want to see more > data that is unambiguously reusable because it has been placed in the > public domain using CC-0 or the Open Data Commons PDDL. > > So, I urge everyone publishing data onto the linked data web to > consider waiving all rights over it using one of the licenses above. I don't think "waiving all rights" is a practical option for the likes of New York Times or Times of London, ditto traditional commercial media companies. > As Kingsley points out, you will always be attributed via the URIs you > mint. This part I totally agree with :-) > > Ian > > PS. This was the subject of my keynote at code4lib 2009 "If you love > something, set it free", which you can view here > http://www.slideshare.net/iandavis/code4lib2009-keynote-1073812 > > The thing about "Free" is that we'll always end up having to disambiguate: "Free Speech" and "Free Beer". That's the sad nature of the overloaded "Free" moniker that belies the Open Source moniker. -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen President & CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 02:00:30 UTC