[open-archaeology] CyArk, Open Access and Creative Commons licenses

Thu Oct 31 09:37:32 UTC 2013

Yes, all a bit depressing really...I suspect however that the situation will be rapidly changed by the degree to which people switch to SfM-MVS (aka 3D photogrammetry, aka 'computer vision' more broadly) style methods for 3D data capture. Laser scans with expensive equipment are likely to become a more niche endeavour? Hence I hope the days of 3D data obstructionism (by companies, their clients etc.) are numbered, but perhaps that is a bit too cyber-utopian for a Thursday morning....no doubt open-washing is here to stay in various forms. Having said this, CyArk has got some good people on board who I suspect think about these issues a fair bit themselves, within their operational constraints (e.g. Justin, who Steko chatted to) -- so worth remaining optimistic!

As a side note, it would also be useful to brainstorm about what open data for SfM-MVS archaeological models should look like. Presumably, making the original raw photos open (with full EXIF tags, alpha channel or other image masks if used, etc.) is as important as the final 3D models? The model-construction methods are only going to get more refined, and hence while re-use of the models is fun, the key downstream resource is provided by the raw overlapping photos? The increased archival burden for a suitable digital repository of such vast numbers of photos is an issue however.

We have a crowd-sourcing / crowd-funding project just starting (with a couple of people here at UCL along with the BM and Dan Pett) which is going to do some of this kind of modelling in a participatory way (with public contributions we hope) and so some consensus on good practice would be helpful (see the place-holder pages at micropasts.org<http://micropasts.org>). Sometimes both photos and model will be released CC0 (if they are freshly captured by us or by contributors to the project), but in other cases (less for 3D modelling admittedly) there are archival images, that we wish to enhance the content of, that both UCL and the BM traditionally release CC-NC.

Andy

On 29 Oct 2013, at 16:02, Stefano Costa wrote:

Dear all,
I think this will be old news for some of you, but I wanted to point out
this conversation that I had on Twitter

https://twitter.com/stekosteko/status/394459313197948929

based on this "horror story" from Martin Hurley

http://rapidlasso.com/2013/04/14/can-you-copyright-lidar/

Now, as I noted in the short 140 characters of one tweet linked above, I
don't think CyArk has a moral or legal obligation to provide truly open
access to the data they create (on behalf of other institutions and
organisations). In many countries, Italy among them, such scanning
campaigns would get through only with severe limitations (as well seen
in the case of the David of Michelangelo scanned years ago by Stanford
University).

What I find unacceptable is that they clearly recognise that there is
value and visibility in Open Access, so they just put a label on their
webpages because after all no one will notice. By their definition of
OA, pretty much all the WWW is Open Access! CyArk hit the news just days
ago with their 500 project and it would be really bad for the public and
the cultural heritage sector (that CyArk champions, from some points of
view) if a "look, but don't touch" approach was taken as the way to go
for open access to such data.

We could digress on the difference between open access and Open Access,
but I don't find it particularly interesting. It would be more
interesting to look into the motivations that institutions collaborating
with CyArk (museums, governments, ...) find to lock down access to
high-res reusable data.

Thoughts welcome!
Ciao,
steko

--
Stefano Costa
http://steko.iosa.it/

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