[open-linguistics] Collection of resources

Nancy Ide ide at cs.vassar.edu
Fri Jan 14 23:26:57 UTC 2011


Hmmm... this is problematic for linguistic data. Most of the things in your list are restricted from commercial use--but of course, the "share-alike" restriction is basically a restriction to non-commercial use, since commercial users can't typically redistribute their products based on or incorporating the data under the same conditions. Anything distributed through the Linguistic Data Consortium has licensing  of one kind or another, which may in fact be different from the definition of open data on the web page. 

I was asked to write a blog for the OKFN site but after I wrote it, I never heard back. I am about to submit it to opensource.com, who also asked me to do a blog on the topic. In it I talk about the problems of "share alike" for linguistic data. In my various roles as president of ACL-SIGANN, developer of the Open American National Corpus, etc., I have been promoting the idea of true openness for linguistic data, involving at most attribution. I would like to suggest that in this list of resources, we differentiate the restrictions on linguistic data in terms of completely open vs. share-alike, vs. anything else.

Just my two cents...

On Jan 14, 2011, at 5:40 PM, William Waites wrote:

> * [2011-01-14 15:58:04 -0500] Nancy Ide <ide at cs.vassar.edu> écrit:
> 
> ] Can I ask a question concerning what you mean by "open" here?
> ] Among the resources listed, there is some variety in the
> ] conditions under which they can be obtained. Is this the
> ] function of the license column? I do think there should be 
> ] a clear statement of what "open" is defined to be, if 
> ] possible--and maybe grouping the datasets by availability type.
> 
> There might be some specialisation of definition for
> linguistic data (analogous to what the bibliographic
> data group is developing) but in general it means
> the sense of http://www.opendefinition.org/
> 
> Happy hacking,
> -w
> -- 
> William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
> http://eris.okfn.org/ww/         <sip:ww at styx.org>
> 9C7E F636 52F6 1004 E40A  E565 98E3 BBF3 8320 7664
> 
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