Re: Proposal for Schema.org extension mechanism

Well, in fact I asked them to confirm that republishing the standard as RDF falls under the notion of permitted use of this statement. And they failed to confirm or clarify over years ;-)

Martin

On 26 Mar 2015, at 19:05, Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com> wrote:

> «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
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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
> >
> >
> >
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> >
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Received on Thursday, 26 March 2015 18:25:54 UTC