Re: There's No Money in Linked Data

Am 01.06.2013 16:42, schrieb Pascal Hitzler:
> Concerning the "Open" issue:
> 
> I'm guilty of not always being clear about the destinction between LD
> and LOD. In fact I believe many people are not clear about it. We should
> ask why they are not. And in fact our little write-up exposes one
> probably reason: The notion simply is rather unclear. "Linked Open Data
> must have an open licence" is - in the light of the analysis in the
> paper - almost meaningless, as "openness" of licences is not a boolean.
> There are many shades to it, and most of these shades do not allow
> readily for commercialization.

Pascal, I somewhat disagree with that statement: there is (and should
be) a clear (boolean) definition what open means: http://opendefinition.org/

The Open Definition precisely defines the requirements for a license in
order to be called open. Allowing remixing and republishing,
availability of data in bulk and non-discriminatory licensing allowing
commercial reuse are core requirements of the open definition.

Open Data is not cardinally different from other "open" domains, e.g.
open source software and for open source software there exists also a
clear definition (overseen by OSI), which is meanwhile widely enforced.

I'm a big fan of both -- Linked Data as a data integration paradigm
within and between organizations AND Linked Open Data as a way to share
data and knowledge openly on the Web. With the Open Definition we have a
clear way to distinguish between the two.

Best,

Sören

PS: A few days I attended a talk by a German lawyer about data licensing
and he said that if you publish your data on the Web without access
control, it is (at least in Germany) not secured by any IPR and everyone
can (without asking the publisher) use the data, republish it and do
whatever with it as he pleases. If this is really true, at least for all
Germans all data published as Linked Data on the Web without any license
would be Open Data too ;-)

> On 5/23/2013 10:09 AM, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>> (not sure why this, which I wrote ages ago, is sitting again
>> in a window on my computer. Apologies if it was already sent before!).
>>
>>
>> Short version: Please change LD to LOD throughout.
>>
>> A little while ago,  when we had made the 5* linked data  mug,
>> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/lod/480759174v0_350x350_Back.jpg
>> I got a valid objection to it from the people doing
>> for example enterprise linked data that their client's
>> data was generally extremely confidential and no way
>> would it be open, and the 5 star principle were really
>> valuable for interoperability, but the clients were scared
>> off by the fact that they could not even get one star without being open.
>>
>> So that led to a big change, and more careful wording
>> and a (then) new mug.
>> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/diagrams/lod/597992118v2_350x350_Back.jpg
>>
>>   The new mug has in black, the Linked Data story, and in green,
>> stamped on
>> "OPEN"  to make the "Linked Data" become "Linked Open Data",
>> and also in green "Open Licence" added to the requirements for the
>> first star.
>> So the mug works two ways.
>> Without the green, it is about Linked Data (LD).
>>   If you include the green (e.g. wearing rose-coloured spectacles)
>> it becomes a recipe for Linked Open Data (LOD).
>>
>> To have even 1 star, Linked Open Data must have an open licence.
>> other wise it is not Linked Open Data at all.
>>
>> Meanwhile, 5* linked data (like my financial data
>> for my taxes) can be completely private.
>>
>> The ability to discuss the different star levels of
>> Linked Data is important too.
>>
>> This distinction has been really important
>> to a lot of people's understanding and to the
>> businesses in the space.
>>
>> So when your article is ONLY about the openness,
>> about the need for linked Open data to be open,
>> it is a big problem that you use the wrong term!
>>
>> There is lots of money in Enterprise Application Integration
>> which is not what you are doing.
>>
>> I would ask you to update the paper.
>> I strongly suggest you update the PDFs you have in place with
>> a back-link to the original.
>>
>> Please edit the paper and basically put "Linked Open Data" and  LOD
>> wherever you are
>> talking about it, not "Linked Data" and LD.
>>
>> Because the points that you make are generally important
>> and interesting and I'd like to be able to point to the paper.
>>
>> I have other comments about the actual content, but
>> this is more important.
>>
>> The title... must be something more appropriate
>> "Commercial use of Linked Open Data stymied by Licence Issues"
>> "LOD re-use plagued by lack of suitable licence"
>> "Viral or missing licenses hamper LOD uptake"
>> ... or something....
>>
>> Thanking you in advance.
>>
>> Tim
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2013-05 -17, at 22:13, Pascal Hitzler wrote:
>>
>>> We just finished a piece indicating serious legal issues regarding
>>> the commercialization of Linked Data - this may be of general
>>> interest, hence the post. We hope to stimulate discussions on this
>>> issue (hence the provokative title).
>>>
>>> Available from
>>> http://knoesis.wright.edu/faculty/pascal/pub/nomoneylod.pdf
>>>
>>> Abstract.
>>> Linked Data (LD) has been an active research area for more than 6
>>> years and many aspects about publishing, retrieving, linking, and
>>> cleaning Linked Data have been investigated. There seems to be a
>>> broad and general agreement that in principle LD datasets can be very
>>> useful for solving a wide variety of problems ranging from practical
>>> industrial analytics to highly specific research problems. Having
>>> these notions in mind, we started exploring the use of notable LD
>>> datasets such as DBpedia, Freebase, Geonames and others for a
>>> commercial application. However, it turns out that using these
>>> datasets in realistic settings is not always easy. Surprisingly, in
>>> many cases the underlying issues are not technical but legal barriers
>>> erected by the LD data publishers. In this paper we argue that these
>>> barriers are often not justified, detrimental to both data publishers
>>> and users, and are often built without much consideration of their
>>> consequences.
>>>
>>> Authors:
>>> Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Chitra Venkatramani
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
>>> Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
>>> pascal@pascal-hitzler.de   http://www.knoesis.org/pascal/
>>> Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
>>> Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

Received on Saturday, 1 June 2013 16:47:48 UTC