[okfn-discuss] Fwd: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up

Thu Mar 10 15:29:36 UTC 2011

Hi all,

I guess some of you are on the W3C Linked Data community list, however I wanted to point those who are not to this interesting debate about openness. Thanks to Adrian for this statement.

Sorry for cross posting.

Regards
Daniel

Begin forwarded message:

> Resent-From: public-lod at w3.org
> From: Adrian Pohl
> Date: 10. März 2011 15:15:14 MEZ
> To: Linked Data community <public-lod at w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up
> 
> Hello Martin,
> 
>> requesting open licenses in the narrow sense basically means requesting the end of intellectual property on the Web.
> 
> Quite the opposite is true. Every license (whether open or not) is
> necessarily based on intellectual property rights. So, using open
> licenses in fact generally strengthens the legal force and
> applicability of intellectual property right.
> 
> What the OKFN's open definition (OD)[1] does is standardizing
> licensing in the sense that all licenses following the OD standard
> might be combined and mixed as you would like to without resulting
> legal discrepancies. The underlying aim is legal compatibility so that
> you don't have to care about legal stuff at all when you combine data
> or content from different sources. Thus, the open definition is
> sometimes called a meta-license. IMO, "Open standards" are rightfully
> the legal counterpart to the technical Linked Data best practices.
> (Though these aren't solely technical because the used standards are
> all in the public domain, otherwise something like the WWW and L(O)D
> wouldn't be possible...)
> 
>> And yes, I agree with Christopher that the extreme notion of "open" is an ideology, not a technology. Being able to automate the evaluation of what you can do with the data is a technology. Requesting that all data must belong to everybody with no strings attached is ideology.
> 
> Nobody requests that "all data must belong to everybody with no
> strings attached" - this is only when you want to get five stars. As I
> understand it the open requirement is very much in line with the
> history of the web as it evolves around open standards and was
> established to share knowledge. One has to respect that. It's
> compatibility (technical as well as legal) that matters, not ideology.
> 
> You could write a "commercial definition" to define licensing
> standards for commercial data publishers to reach compatibility in the
> world of commercial data providers and non-open licenses...
> 
> Adrian
> 
> [1] http://www.opendefinition.org/
> 
> 2011/3/10 Martin Hepp:
>> Hi Egon,
>> 
>> for mashing / reusing data, you do NOT need widely open licenses; what you need are
>> 1. STANDARDIZED licenses
>> 2. that are identified by a URI so that you can simply evaluate what you are allowed to do with the data by simple URI comparison.
>> 
>> Proprietary licenses are problematic, because you cannot automatically evaluate what you are allowed to do with the data; that's clear. But a standardized license that says
>> - "caching forbidden" or
>> - "all triples attached to a subject in this graph must be preserved when republishing parts of this dataset" or
>> - "foaf:page and foaf:homepage links attached to entities must be displayed in all HTML renderings of the data"
>> 
>> would not really impede the mashing and reuse of data.
>> 
>> And yes, I agree with Christopher that the extreme notion of "open" is an ideology, not a technology. Being able to automate the evaluation of what you can do with the data is a technology. Requesting that all data must belong to everybody with no strings attached is ideology.
>> 
>> A lot of relevant data represents (at least partly) copyrighted works, and requesting open licenses in the narrow sense basically means requesting the end of intellectual property on the Web.
>> 
>> Again, URIs for standardized licenses would be sufficient, however narrow the licensing terms may be.
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>> 
>> On Mar 10, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Egon Willighagen wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Christopher,
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Christopher Gutteridge
>>> <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>> "Is that bad? For Linked Data to be useful, you need to be able to mix and
>>>> share.". Sorry but that's simply not true. For it to be useful *to you*,
>>>> perhaps, but (Closed) Linked Data still has massive value as a technology
>>>> and not all data should or can be fully open!
>>> 
>>> Data consumption is indeed a 'use' too. Like watching the Simpsons.
>>> Sorry for being sloppy there. There most certainly is a place and use
>>> for Linked (Closed) Data.
>>> 
>>>> Linking and Openness are two unrelated, but great, things to do but you can
>>>> do them independently. There is still value in data which is Linked but not
>>>> entirely or even slightly open.
>>>> 
>>>> Open is the gold standard, but it's not the only form of Linked Data.
>>> 
>>> Indeed not. And apologies for implying that Linked Data is bad in
>>> itself. It simply disallows certain important use cases, which is what
>>> I wanted to say.
>>> 
>>>> There's a massive value to companies to produce Linked Intranets which will
>>>> link and use open data from outside, but certainly not be open.
>>> 
>>> Linked Data often needs dedicated, often individual licensing to keep
>>> things going. While inefficient, there is a valid choice.
>>> 
>>>> At the heart of our university are lectures. From a Linked data perspective,
>>>> these are a motherlode of linkage. A lecture is the nexus point joining: A
>>>> room, eg. <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/room/59-1257> with a lecturer, eg.
>>>> <http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/60> with a number of students, with the
>>>> URI of a Module
>>>> <http://data.southampton.ac.uk/module/COMP1004/2010-2011.html> and the
>>>> specific instance of that module
>>>> <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/module-instance/10622/2010-2011> and resources
>>>> for that lecture <http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/455> . However,
>>>> unlike most of our other data, it would take a huge policy decision to make
>>>> this information freely available, but I can still make it available in a
>>>> closed form to a student or staff member, upon authentication, which means
>>>> that they can still have it on an iphone app / google calendar etc.
>>> 
>>> So, can a student actually start a cool webservice where students can
>>> mashup their classes with FaceBook? They will be redistributing the
>>> data. Are they allowed? Are they allowed to fix errors and share
>>> those? Are they allowed to make some profit out of it, to pay for the
>>> Amazon EC2 hosting? If your data is not Open, they cannot.
>>> 
>>>> Linked is a technology.
>>>> Open is an ideology.
>>> 
>>> I do not think that is true. Instead, I see them as both technologies:
>>> they are both inventions to make things possible.
>>> 
>>>> Right now <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/eprints> is technically
>>>> should get ZERO stars as it's very complex to work out what license we have
>>>> the right to use.
>>> 
>>> And why is that? It sounds to me this is because your upstream data
>>> provider is zero star? Should a star-rating system fail (or ideals
>>> change), because the UK law system is, umm, akward?
>>> 
>>>> Some of the abstracts of papers may legally belong to
>>>> publishers and it may be OK for us to publish and distribute tham as data,
>>>> but not to grant licenses on something we don't own.
>>> 
>>> Well, I'd be the last to say the current publishing practices are
>>> technologically working efficiently :) I've ranted enough about that
>>> in my blog.
>>> 
>>>> This dataset is on two
>>>> journeys, one ends with an open license (silver to gold), one with it
>>>> getting fully linked into the data web (* to *****). They converge at the
>>>> heady heights of 5 gold-star fully linked and open data.
>>> 
>>> I fully understand how hard it is to not be able to join the party,
>>> because your data providers are not cooperating, as they limit you
>>> what to do with their data. But I feel bad about that deciding what
>>> our ideals should be.
>>> 
>>> Instead, I would suggest SOTON to split data sets, and makes parts of
>>> it Open (those for which it can), and make the Closed bits separately
>>> available as Closed. That way, you still get your FIVE stars.
>>> 
>>> See, 'Open' is a technology: the fact that some closed data
>>> "copylefts" the whole package doesn't sounds like an ideological, but
>>> really a technological (legal) problem to me. But this can be simply
>>> overcome to make them separately available, I think, just like Bio2RDF
>>> and others do.
>>> 
>>> Egon
>>> 