[okfn-discuss] Licenses for open knowledge represented in triples

[Rufus Pollock]

Sören Auer wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> some days ago we released Triplify [1] - a small plugin for database 

I assume that was supposed to be:

   <http://triplify.org/>

;)

> backed Web applications (such as Drupal, WordPress, WackoWiki), which 
> exposes the content of your Web site as RDF, Linked Data and JSON and is 
> extremely easy to deploy.

Looks really nice.

> We hope this will increase the amount of machine processable 
> open-knowledge on the Web dramatically.
> For the next release of Triplify we are thinking about adding a feature 
> to reference some kind of a license from the content published by Triplify.
> Are there any ideas, what would be good licenses to that purpose: I 
> guess licenses for text, images etc. are not very suitable, because e.g. 
> it is unclear what it means to be a derived work (from perspective of a 
> set of RDF triples) or how to express an attribution. I guess for our 

You've got some complexities here. Though the triples themselves could 
be seen as data there might well be quite a lot of 'content' in there 
(text/images etc) that is copyrighted.

> purposes a very liberal license (allowing basically everything without 
> any limitations) would be sufficient for now.

For ultraliberal you could try the ODC Public Domain Dedication and 
License (launched last saturday at OKCon [1]):

<http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/>

~rufus

[1]:<http://blog.okfn.org/2008/03/18/public-domain-dedication-license-pddl-v10-released-at-okcon/>