Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism

«The UNSPSC is an "open source" standard for content, meaning that it is
truly in the public domain. The United Nations owns the copyright to the
work contributed by the UNSPSC volunteer experts. For this reason, the
codeset can be used without any use restrictions or licensing fees. While
the NATO system is a very good system, it is designed to meet the needs of
NATO whereas the UNSPSC is designed specifically for commercial procurement
purposes.»

 http://www.unspsc.org/faqs#What is the difference between NATO and UNSPSC

They use the term "public domain" incorrectly, but they would seem to be
more concerned with protecting the trademark to prevent "forking". Since
this paragraph clearly wasn't written by a lawyer, it's hard to say for
sure.

(The capsule summary of the licensing for WIPO's vocabulary for trademarks
is much more clearly written. It's like they spend way to much time
thinking about this stuff :-)
On Mar 26, 2015 1:37 PM, "martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org" <
martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org> wrote:

> Dear Pat:
>
> I have tried for almost a decade to get permission from the United Nations
> (*) to publish a thoroughly constructed RDF conversion of the UNSPSC, so I
> can feel your pain.
> The problem you describe is at the core of many attempts of re-using
> existing standards for the Web of Data: Most standards are subject to
> copyright protection in one way or the other, so to be on the safe side,
> you need their creators' permission. Also, the standards are evolving, thus
> you need to keep your variant in sync with the official standard.
>
> The permission is hard to get, because the relevant bodies typically do
> not sign off liberal copyright licenses easily, and they do not have the
> budget or do not see the benefit in paying a lawyer to evaluate the
> feasibility (note that they must also check whether they have sufficient
> rights themselves, so they cannot easily grant a CC license).
>
> Often branding and trademark protection, and existing business models, are
> a problem, too.
>
> In a nutshell, this is why I suggest to use string literals in lieu of
> URLs for existing standards. Referring to a string precisely defined in an
> external standard is as reliable as using a URI, and while it is not
> "Linked Open Data"-style and you cannot easily get a description by HTTP,
> you eliminate all the legal and technical hassles of republishing a
> standard as Linked Open Data.
>
> Also, I think that a badly implemented Linked Open Data variant of a
> standard is worse than the authoritative string from the original standard.
>
> With badly implemented I mean e.g. that the LOD version is not in sync
> with the latest version of the standard, or that the owner of the domain
> looses interest or goes bankrupt, with the consequence that the shiny URIs
> start rotting in the sunlight and are difficult to eliminate from data and
> applications.
>
> Martin
>
> (*) Actually I gave up after five years ;-)
> (**) Instead we publish a tool to regenerate the RDF transcripts locally
> in a canonical form, see
> http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Tools/PCS2OWL
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> martin hepp
> e-business & web science research group
> universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen
>
> e-mail:  martin.hepp@unibw.de
> phone:   +49-(0)89-6004-4217
> fax:     +49-(0)89-6004-4620
> www:     http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/ (group)
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> skype:   mfhepp
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>
> Check out GoodRelations for E-Commerce on the Web of Linked Data!
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>
>
>
>
> On 26 Mar 2015, at 18:04, McBennett, Pat <McBennettP@DNB.com> wrote:
>
> > I totally agree with Martin Hepp’s comments. I’ve recently begun exactly
> the process Martin describes (i.e. defining ‘Web ontologies / shared
> schemas’), and already I’m finding all 3 of his points are spot-on.
> >
> > But I’d like to ask Martin – what form of mechanism does he think could
> work for ‘…tapping into the potential of the many, many interesting schemas
> and standards out there […] without the need to channel those through the
> social and technical process of getting into schema.org core’?
> >
> > As a very simple example – I’m currently trying to find an existing RDF
> schema or standard for International Country Codes, but one which is
> ‘authoritative’. ISO was an obvious place to start, so I asked them if they
> could provide these codes as RDF (I can that they currently provide them as
> CSV, XML or XLS [1]). Their response:
> >
> > Dear Pat,
> >
> > We do not product any RDF formats, I am sorry.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > So that means although there are ISO country codes in the public domain
> (e.g. IRL, or FRA, or USA), and of course I can use those codes freely,
> there are no ‘official’ URI’s out there for those codes (that I’m aware of)
> – i.e. there is no ‘http://www.iso.org/country/alpha-3/IRL’ for Ireland.
> So unless I can presuade the ISO to mint these URI’s for ‘their’ country
> codes (which I would see as ideal, since they are a recognised authority,
> but it seems unlikely in the sort term), what mechanism do I have to use
> standardised, authoritative (i.e. as opposed to crowdsourced Wikipedia (or
> DBPedia) URI identifiers for countries in my internal datasets? I could
> mint my own URI’s for these country codes under my companies domain name,
> but that’s hardly appropriate as we’ve no interest in being an authority on
> country code identifiers (and we’d have the maintanance overhead of trying
> to keep them in-sync with the ‘real’ ISO codes)…
> >
> > Which is why I would have thought an extension to Schema.org might offer
> a good opportunity for this (since Schema.org has already become the de
> facto authority for lots of things!). But am I just being naïve somehow…?
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Pat.
> >
> >
> > [1] - http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes.htm
> >
> >
> >
> > <image001.png>
> >
> > Pat McBennett
> > Architect
> > The Chase Building, 5th Floor
> > Carmanhall Road, Sandyford,
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