[ckan-discuss] Data Hub should state reason for a dataset being considered non-open

Mon Oct 24 19:28:49 BST 2011

On 24 October 2011 18:55, Richard Cyganiak <richard at cyganiak.de> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Many datasets on the Data Hub have a generic “Not Open” box:
>
> [[
> This dataset is Not Open. Either because it is not openly licensed or is
> missing downloadable resources.
> ]]
>
> I feel that some more detail here would help. This generic message can mean
> very different things:
>
> - The contributors who created the Data Hub record didn't specify the
> license
>
> - The publisher of the dataset published it without an explicit license
>
> - There is an explicit license, but it is not considered open, such as
> CC-BY-NC
>
> I am sometimes sending Data Hub URLs to people who ask me about sources for
> particular kinds of data, and have received knee-jerk replies like, “But
> that dataset is not open!” when in fact the license information was simply
> left empty in the Data Hub record or was noncommercial.
>
>
> May I suggest three improvements:
>
>
> 1. If there is an explicit but non-OKD compliant license, such as CC-BY-NC,
> then this should be stated explicitly, perhaps:
>
> “This dataset is Not Open. License: Creative Commons Attribution
> Noncommerical. This is not an open license as it does not meet the Open
> Knowledge Definition.”
>
> The current approach, which is to simply not show the license at all if
> it's not OKD-compliant, does a bit of a disservice to site visitors IMO.
> CC-BY-NC might just be good enough for some visitors. Why hide this
> information?
>
>
> 2. If the license is marked as “Other::License Not Specified”, then this
> should be stated explicitly, perhaps:
>
> “This dataset is Not Open. It is published without an explicit license, the
> publisher reserves all rights to the dataset.”
>
>
> 3. If the license field was left empty by the contributor of the Data Hub
> record, then again this should be stated explicitly, perhaps:
>
> “This dataset is Not Open. The license of this dataset is unknown or
> unspecified. Start an enquiry on IsItOpenData »”
>

+1 to all this from me.

> (I'm not sure how “is missing downloadable resources” should factor into
> those categories.)
>

Yes we could say that "This dataset is Not Open. A download link or API
providing full access is unknown or not specified."

David

> Thanks for considering this,
> Richard
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