Re: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up

On Thu, 2011-03-10 at 15:15 +0100, Adrian Pohl wrote: 
> Hello Martin,

[snip]

> > And yes, I agree with Christopher that the extreme notion of "open" is an ideology, not a technology. Being able to automate the evaluation of what you can do with the data is a technology. Requesting that all data must belong to everybody with no strings attached is ideology.
> 
> Nobody requests that "all data must belong to everybody with no
> strings attached" - this is only when you want to get five stars.

You need it for *any* stars:

"1 star - Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open
licence" [1]

The point is that the 5-star scheme requires open in the legal sense as
a prerequisite for getting on the scale at all, open in the technical
interoperability sense just helps you get more stars.

Makes perfect sense for government data releases, which is the context
in which the scheme was developed I believe. 

> As I
> understand it the open requirement is very much in line with the
> history of the web as it evolves around open standards and was
> established to share knowledge. One has to respect that. It's
> compatibility (technical as well as legal) that matters, not ideology.
> 
> You could write a "commercial definition" to define licensing
> standards for commercial data publishers to reach compatibility in the
> world of commercial data providers and non-open licenses...

Of course, and you would have achieved interoperability and great things
but following that wouldn't count for a single star on Tim's 5-star
scheme. Which I think is Martin's issue.

Dave

[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 14:58:54 UTC