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

[Richard Cyganiak]

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 »”


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


Thanks for considering this,
Richard