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

[David Read]

Great, that's all agreed then. I've raised a ticket:
http://trac.ckan.org/ticket/1424 to get it done.

David

On 26 October 2011 11:06, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:

> 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.
> > ]]
>
> Is this in search results or in dataset page (or both)?
>
> > 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.
>
> Understood.
>
> > 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.”
>
> Agreed.
>
> > 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?
>
> This is a bug in fact :-) (not intentional). In theme refactor we've
> accidentally removed showing the license in this case. This will get
> fixed.
>
> > 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.”
>
> Good point.
>
> > 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 »”
>
> Yes though 2. and 3. are often the same (and e.g. license not
> specified should also lead to an option to start isitopen enquiry --
> soon to be integrated with ckan itself i hope!)
>
> > (I'm not sure how “is missing downloadable resources” should factor into
> those categories.)
>
> I thought this was already removed. IMO 'Not Open' should only be
> about the license going forward (resource availability does matter but
> the presence / absence on thedatahub is not a reliable indicator so we
> shouldn't use it).
>
> > Thanks for considering this,
>
> Not at all -- keep the suggestions coming :-)
>
> Rufus
>
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