[od-discuss] Open Data Buttons

Fri Mar 9 19:57:08 UTC 2012

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 9:59 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>
> wrote:
>> Ah the curse of changing themes in wordpress -- all your footer
>> widgets go walkabout.
>>
> This is actually a serious problem. Many licences are attached to sites and
> containers rather than documents and components of documents. I have had the
> same problem as Rufus - I don't control my wordpress site and every so often
> the licence gets dropped.

The only "solutions" are incremental -- make it slightly easier to
maintain provenance and/or slightly more of a pain to remove it. The
problem is that metadata is costly, and obtaining benefits runs into
education and/or n:n software integration issues.

The most important thing is for people to care about, preferably rely
on, open licenses.

Other than a site notice built into a site template that might be
changed by some unknowing designer, the obvious options are

- adding license notice to each article (downside: a pain, might be forgotten)
- using a plugin to manage licenses (downside: plugin might be turned off)

Obviously these two could be combined -- a plugin that adds license
notice to each new article such that the plugin only needs to be
enabled at article creation; after that notice is just part of article
content. I don't know of any plugins that actually do this.

> It's even worse for images. If I publish in an Open Access journal (CC-BY)
> and someone re-uses an image (which they may, of course do) then the image
> doesn't carry a licence automatically. Yes, the re-user is required to carry
> the licence but it's hard work for each image and some of us occasionally
> slip up. Is there a solution for this?

- modify bitmap image to include license notice / attribution info
(downside: can make image less useful/uglier, bitmaps don't include
links)
- modify vector image (SVG) per above, possibly even wrap bitmap in an
SVG (downside: browser SVG handling still not wonderfully consistent)
- embed license/attribution info into image as XMP (downside: almost
no chance a user will notice, as tools don't expose this embedded
info)
- publish image with adequate license notice/attribution info in
caption/overlay, preferably using semantic annotation like RDFa
(downside: simply saving the image loses context)

These aren't mutually exclusive of course. And can be assisted by more
sophisticated CMS plugins as mentioned above, but aware of article
components.

There's also the hope that web scale image comparisons will improve,
and publishing metadata will be less relevant to maintaining
provenance (but this still requires someone to have published adequate
info in the first place, so doesn't really obviate at least the last
bullet above).

Mike