Re: ANN: SKOS implementation of the ACM Communication Classification System

Hi Leigh,

6/2/2011 2:07 PM Leigh Dodds:
 > Very happy to see more data appearing, congrats :)

Actually there is prior work here (by Dragan Gasevic; search Google for 
"gasevic skos acm ccs"), but that implementation had, in contrast to the 
RKB Explorer RDFS implementation.  So we would probably be the first one 
to release a complete SKOS implementation in a linked data compliant way.

 > I won't reproduce the text here, and I'm not a lawyer, but the wording
 > says "...to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to
 > lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request
 > permission to republish from..[address+email]".

That is a valid point -- even my publishing of the SKOS implementation 
can be considered a "republication", "posted on a server".  Therefore I 
have put the implementation offline, linking to this e-mail for 
explanation.

 > I think one reasonable thing that someone may want to do is mirror the
 > data, e.g. to provide a public SPARQL endpoint or other services.
 > Currently it doesn't look like I can do that without contacting the
 > ACM directly, which I assume you've also done.

Actually not, but I'm now sending them a request for permission.  I 
started quite naïvely.  The RKB Explorer RDFS implementation of the ACM 
CCS, which was my original source (before completing the missing 
information from the ACM site), was publicly available 
(http://acm.rkbexplorer.com/ontologies/acm#).  According to the homepage 
they had obtained permission from ACM to republish metadata about 
publications (http://acm.rkbexplorer.com/), but that is not obvious when 
accessing the ACM CCS implementation in a linked data way.

 > It's not clear to me whether I could even copy parts of the data and
 > index it to use in an application, as that potentially falls out side
 > of the personal and classroom use.

Indeed, that argument convinces me, so I will ask them.

 > I fully support arguments to the effect of "use and seek forgiveness
 > later" when using data, but as we see more and more commercial usage
 > of Linked Data, I think we really need to see clearer licensing around
 > data. Otherwise feels like we're building on uncertain ground.

And if they answer something like "you can put it online, but it may 
only be used for classroom use", that is not really helpful, as there is 
not yet a practically working mechanism that would prevent linked data 
from being used for something else (e.g. joined with some e-business 
data in the same query).  An interesting research problem in itself, but 
here and now I am merely interested in using the ACM CCS for our own 
purposes, plus making our implementation available, so that others don't 
have to reimplement it over and over again.

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, Coordinator CASE Research Center
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Received on Thursday, 2 June 2011 13:20:24 UTC