[open-archaeology] starting

[Jo Walsh]

dear Stefano, all,

> This is true, but look as an example at the ADS website. The amphorae
> database there [1] is an essential reference, but requiring the user to
> click and accept terms of use before entering the website is not only
> quite annoying, but makes a linked data infrastructure unbelievably
> harder to implement, as I see it.

Right, this looks like a general problem for research data collections 
which use some technical means to limit access - even if that limit is 
only a "click-use" stage. I wrote a bit about linked data and access 
management for research use on the blog for my work project, Unlock:
http://unlockdata.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/linked-data-jisc-and-access/

> I think there are
> hundreds of databases within single research centres right now, each one
> aimed at one specific target. I believe that most value brought by open
> data lies exactly in what others can do with our data that we would
> never imagine about.

Recently saw a presentation on Europeana.eu , an aggregation of metadata 
on "heritage objects" across hundreds of European cultural institutions. 
Europeana are promoting among institutions a CC-BY-SA license *for 
metadata* that they are collecting. Their reasoning goes like this:

- We want to be able to offer back to institutions, all the metadata 
contributed by others
- Institutions are nervous about commercial exploitation of their work 
without restraint
- As administrators of the resource network, we want to encourage 
commercial exploitation *as long as there is some benefit to institutions*
- The transaction and technical cost of providing Europeana metadata 
under a non-commercial license while offering a separate commercial 
license, outweighs the potential revenue benefits
- So CC-BY-SA is a compromise that returns some of the added value to 
"memory institutions"

It would be an interesting line of reasoning to apply to, say, a 
European-level aggregation of site records.

[Disclaimer - I am not an archaeologist, ADS are using the location 
search service I manage for EDINA, the UK research data & service 
centre. I *should* just be listening here, really :)]

cheers,


jo