Re: ontology of (open source) licenses?

Thanks all for your responses.  It is interesting that I misled some  
people into thinking I wanted a list of properties/schema for  
describing open source licenses, rather than the list of licenses  
itself. (Sorry about that!)

(doap is very nice, by the way, as was the cc schema.)  I'm  
particularly looking for the list of URIs to satisfy the doap property  
(with open source licenses only, of course)

    <rdf:Property rdf:about="http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#license">

The dbpedia suggestion is excellent, in that if there is an open  
source license that isn't in wikipedia (or an inappropriate entry), we  
can 'just change it' in wikipedia.  Assuming the wikipedia DB gets  
recrawled at some reasonable frequency.  Some specific issues jump out  
along these lines:
  - MindTouch is a company, not a license.
  - Permissive_free_software_licenses is a category, not a license.
  - free_content is a description of content, not of a license.

Ah, but one hitch: do these licenses have versions?  If so, we would  
have maintain that information out of band, because dbpedia is only  
capable of providing the latest wikipedia context, right? It isn't  
really a controlled vocabulary, in that sense.

And about deprecation: if someday a license is considered defunct and  
someone removes it from Wikipedia, then it will also disappear from  
dbpedia, and any references to it will thereby not be resolvable.  Is  
that correct?  so (example) if the PHP License changes someday to not  
be open source, it will disappear from the 'vocabulary list' at [3].

So (at the risk of adding lots of work for little short-term gain), I  
conclude that if I really want to have a deterministic and historical  
record of the open source licenses over time, I will need to create my  
own vocabulary and track its changes.

Thoughts?

John








On Aug 20, 2009, at 9:05 AM, Alexandre Passant wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 18 Aug 2009, at 18:38, John Graybeal wrote:
>
>> (Sorry, I sent this Aug 13 right after I changed my subscribed  
>> email, and I can't verify it went through. Trying again.)
>>
>> Does anyone know of a good ontology, umm, highly structured  
>> vocabulary in RDF or OWL, of open source licenses?  Ideally it  
>> would be reasonably complete; not so critical that it be  
>> ontologically rich.
>>
>
> DOAP defines a property to link projects to their license [1]
> A good idea could be to use DBPedia URIs for the licenses  
> themselves, e.g. [2]
> You can then use the relationships provided by DBPedia to identify  
> that's an open-source license, see [3]
>
> HTH,
>
> Alex.
>
> [1] http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap
> [2] http://dbpedia.org/resource/GNU_General_Public_License
> [3] http://dbpedia.org/class/yago/OpenSourceLicenses
>
>> John
>> ---------------
>> John Graybeal
>> Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
>> graybeal@marinemetadata.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Dr. Alexandre Passant
> Digital Enterprise Research Institute
> National University of Ireland, Galway
> :me owl:sameAs <http://apassant.net/alex> .
>
>
>
>
>
>

---------------
John Graybeal
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
graybeal@marinemetadata.org

Received on Saturday, 22 August 2009 01:58:57 UTC