Re: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up

Oh dear - I knew I would join eventually.
There is danger in actually defining terms when essentially we are talking about PR.
This is not dishonest, it is pragmatic.
The 5 stars are great, because they are so simple that any CEO or CTO thinks they can understand them.
"Get me to 3 stars by yesterday!"
Anything more complex (two scales, etc.) would completely undermine this.
I could argue step for step why each is not exactly right, probably with all the problems already mentioned, but that reminds me of minor (and irrelevant) political parties arguing over the exact meaning of phrases in their favourite book and expecting the world to care, rather than walk on by.

By the way, on the open front:
"Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open licence"
I choose to parse this as the licence being open, not the data.
That is, having a licence that I can examine is the most important thing, the content of the licence is not so relevant.
It does not say
"Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open content licence" or some such.

OKFN open has been mentioned - if you want to see an OKFN view of open, I think
http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/15/open-licenses-vs-public-licenses/ helps.

So let's just please fix the typos ("hsould be regisetred"!, and is there something missing at the end?) and get on with it - if people want other scales, then that is fine, but don't touch the 5 stars - they really work!

Cheers
Hugh

On 10 Mar 2011, at 14:50, Dave Reynolds wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Hugh Glaser,  
              Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
              School of Electronics and Computer Science,
              University of Southampton,
              Southampton SO17 1BJ
Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
Mobile: +44 78 9422 3822, Home: +44 23 8061 5652
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~hg/

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 17:02:36 UTC