[OT] Using RDFa For License Meta-Data [WAS Re: FYI]

(this is probably OT but intersects with one of my interests in RDFa.
i won't be offended if people jump in and suggest i take this
elsewhere...)

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:30 AM, Ben Adida <ben@adida.net> wrote:
>
>
> http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015878.html

interesting: coming from a different direction (license auditing for
FLOSS), i came to similar conclusions

> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2008Aug/0024.html

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> In practice, it seems that just inspecting the content for a copyright
> statement is more than enough to address the needs of people who want to
> reuse content. Furthermore, as noted above, at least one of the major
> search engines that can be used to track down content of one type or
> another certainly isn't even remotely attempting to build the tools to
> that level of granularity, and as far as I'm aware, hasn't received any
> significant amount of feedback requesting such features.

this really doesn't accord with experience in the apache incubator. we
need to understand the licensing of documents composing a release.
it's just not practical to expect a volunteer to review hundreds of
documents and read each licensing statement. automation is necessary.
this is relatively easy for textual documents with standard license
headers. IMHO the right way to address documents without such headers
is to use separate meta-data but microformats are just don't seem to
be expressive or precise enough for licensing auditing.

> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2008Aug/0025.html

IMHO understanding complex collectives requires more precision than
offered by microformats. RDF seems very natural for this use case.
RDFa has the advantage that it should be possible to have the
meta-data render reasonably in a browser.

- robert

Received on Sunday, 24 August 2008 07:20:43 UTC