W3C Annotated Document License

Hi Rigo!
We talked on Saturday about spec licensing for citations and annotations.
That is, you talked about working on a license for citations of specs, and
Arron Eicholz and I mentioned that it would be useful to also have one for
annotations of specs.

The use cases for allowing the publication of annotated specs are many,
some specific ones include
   - publishing a copy of the spec with links to relevant bug reports
   - publishing a copy of the spec with a list of test assertions for
     each sentence/paragraph in the spec, for use in QA
   - publishing a copy of the spec with links to relevant test cases

The intent, which should be captured in the license, is that the annotations
be supplemental information, not an attempt to alter the definitions in the
spec. The license could require this to be clearly explained up front, and/or
require the use of some boilerplate text that declares this copy of the spec
as an annotated copy.

We discussed that the license should apply equally to all publication
formats, including plaintext, and should not require a particular markup
or styling to distinguish annotations. However, the license should require
that the document define its convention for annotations and that the
annotations should be clearly distinguishable from the original spec text.

(Several CSS3 specs do something similar with the distinction between
  normative text and examples, e.g.
   http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-namespace/#conformance
  defines the wording, markup, and styling conventions for examples in
  the CSS Namespaces spec.)

You asked me to send you a reminder of the discussion when I got home,
and that's is it as far as I remember. I'm happy to discuss use cases and
possible approaches to solving them, and look forward to seeing what you
come up with. :)

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 22:18:19 UTC