Re: Generic Property-Value Proposal for Schema.org

> Are you saying there are legal restrictions to create mapping files between industry standards (some of which may be proprietary) and internal vocabularies? Are there any restrictions to publicly releasing such mappings?
> 
> If these are allowable, then "hosting" the native vocabularies is immaterial.
> 
> My understanding of the answer to these two questions is NO.  But, I only play a lawyer on TV.
> 


I was saying that publishing an OWL vocabulary containing at least class and property labels that is directly derived from an existing classification standard requires a license from the owner of the intellectual property. That means that unless you can motivate the standards body to publish a Web ontology version of its classes and properties, it is very difficult to use that standard for structured data on the Web. I am no lawyer and can thus not assess whether collections of identifiers alone are subject to IPR, but in general, this is a non-trivial issue.

For instance, I have been trying to get legal approval from the UN from 2004 - 2007 to publish my OWL variant of www.unspsc.org on the Web, or for them to host my OWL versions on their server, and eventually gave up.

For eClass, we developed a proper OWL transformation, but since eClass lives from membership fees for accessing the full standard, they could eventually not agree to publishing the OWL version on the Web after the 5.1 version (for which they had given me permission).

And the story goes on.

With my proposal, you can immediately use the local identifiers for any of the properties from eClass, GPC, etc. for exposing product feature


Best
Martin

Received on Thursday, 1 May 2014 01:16:30 UTC