[okfn-discuss] Fwd: [sc-announce] "Ontology sharing and copyright considerations" - Science Commons blog

Sun Nov 8 19:30:38 UTC 2009

Nice brief piece from Science Commons - recommending CC0 or CC-BY for
sharing ontologies...

Jonathan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kaitlin Thaney <kaitlin at creativecommons.org>
Date: Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 6:37 PM
Subject: [sc-announce] "Ontology sharing and copyright considerations"
- Science Commons blog
To: sc-announce at lists.ibiblio.org

Ontology sharing and copyright considerations

November 3rd, 2009 by Kaitlin Thaney

Important (and exciting) news in the world of shared vocabularies at
Science Commons, a key component of our technical work to make
knowledge sharing more efficient.

As of last week, OWL 2 – a standard web ontology language – was
formally recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of
their Semantic Web activity. Science Commons’ Alan Ruttenberg has been
diligently working with the OWL working group specifying OWL 2 at the
W3C to push this recommendation through. (Ruttenberg is the co-chair
with Ian Horrocks at Oxford.) The W3C says that the transition to OWL
2 is a reflection of user experience with OWL, and the need to enable
seamless integration and scalability.

>From the W3C’s announcement:

“[OWL 2] allows people to capture their knowledge about a particular
domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage
information, search through it, and learn more from it. Furthermore,
as an open standard based on Web technology, it lowers the cost of
merging knowledge from multiple domains.”

Also, building off of our existing work around the application of
copyright licenses to content and data, there is now a resource
available at sciencecommons.org that sheds light on copyright
considerations for ontologies. We have long been asked what is the
best means to license (or not) ontologies, a topic that’s not always
easy to discern in terms of applicable rights regimes.

The resource explores when copyright may apply to an ontology as well
as a number of other concerns regarding protection and the means to
achieve that.

You can find this resource – “Ontology Copyright Licensing
Considerations” – in our Reading Room.

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http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2009/11/03/ontology-sharing-and-copyright-considerations/

--------------------------------------
Kaitlin Thaney
Program Manager
Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org
kaitlin at creativecommons.org
--------------------------------------

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-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org