[open-linguistics] META-NET Data Liberation Campaign

Wed Dec 5 16:58:33 UTC 2012

Thanks for your feedback Nancy. You raise a very valid point about the 
licensing restrictions and how a move towards fully open data is a goal 
we would like to pursue. In this instance with our data liberation 
campaign we are trying to take some small but concrete steps in this 
direction.

If we were to lobby the owners of this data to try and ask that they 
simply move to a fully open distribution model right away I think that 
we wouldn't have much success in getting them to loosen their 
restrictions at all. Instead through the approach we're taking of 
inviting them to share the data in some situations we're hoping to be 
able to "get our foot in the door" and show them that there's nothing to 
fear from sharing their data and much to gain.

Through this approach we've already had some successes, which I hope to 
report on more fully at a later stage when the details have firmed up. 
But suffice to say I think that given the tight restrictive 
circumstances under which much of this data is currently being held that 
, for now at least, this softly softly approach where we offer the 
owners everything from an open distribution channel to free legal help 
with regards licensing is helping free up the data and opening the minds 
of those holding it to the greater possibilities of loosening their 
restrictions. So in my view this is just a first step, and an important 
one to show that there are good citizens out there and that that 
community wants and needs the data to be freely available through less 
restrictive licences.

All the best,
John

On 05/12/2012 16:15, Nancy Ide wrote:
> I would like to raise a concern here that calling for "open for 
> research" licensing is potentially damaging to our interests, in the 
> sense that it promotes a practice that is counter to what I assume 
> (hope) is the overall goal: fully open data, restricted to no one for 
> any purpose and thereby /supportive of collaborative development 
> across both nonprofit and commercial organizations/. Given the EU's 
> promotion of collaboration between research and industry in their 
> funding model, it would seem that this would be in the interest of the 
> official language bodies in Europe as well.
>
> A look at the impact of the promotion of GNU (copyleft) and 
> "share-alike" licenses makes my point: promotion of these licenses as 
> the "good citizen's license" has had a subtle but pervasive impact on 
> software and data licensing, in that these licenses are at this point 
> the /de facto/ licenses of choice. Unfortunately, such licenses are 
> often not suitable for commercial use because of the requirement to 
> distribute results under the same terms. So what we have is a grass 
> roots effort to be open that in fact has had the result of obstructing 
> full openness. I fear that the promotion of the even stronger 
> research-only restriction will have a similar, and even more damaging, 
> effect.
>
> I would recommend promotion of something like the Apache 2.0 license 
> (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0), even if (as pointed out 
> in the note below) it is not likely that such a license would be 
> acceptable in this instance. That would send the message that a fully 
> open license is what the community feels is the good citizen's choice, 
> in that it supports collaborative development among both nonprofit and 
> commercial organizations. If there cannot be agreement to adopt this 
> type of licensing, so be it, but the message from the community should 
> be clear about what we see as the ideal.
>
> Nancy Ide
>
> =======================================================
> Nancy Ide
> Professor of Computer Science
>
> Department of Computer Science
> Vassar College
> Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520
> USA
>
> tel: (+1 845) 437 5988
> fax: (+1 845) 437 7498
> email: ide at cs.vassar.edu <mailto:ide at cs.vassar.edu>
> http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide <http://www.cs.vassar.edu/%7Eide>
> =======================================================
>
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 3, 2012, at 7:25 PM, Christian Chiarcos 
> <christian.chiarcos at web.de <mailto:christian.chiarcos at web.de>> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> as most of us probably know, a number of "reference corpora" for 
>> major (and minor) languages of Europe that have been produced in the 
>> last decades, but many of them are not fully available to the public 
>> (not even under a restrictive license), or available in a snippet 
>> view on the web only (and hence unusable for NLP or advanced 
>> statistical analyses), -- not to talk about open licenses.
>>
>> To address this issue, META-NET have prepared an open letter to all 
>> the official language bodies in Europe and to those holding onto the 
>> various corpora calling on them to consider trying to make this 
>> important language data available for research purposes.  If you feel 
>> that there is a huge benefit to liberating these corpora and making 
>> them available for research then please contact your local language 
>> body and let them know that you are in favour of the META-NET proposal.
>>
>> More on this can be found on our blog, in a recent post by John 
>> Judge, META-NET Ireland 
>> (http://linguistics.okfn.org/2012/11/19/meta-net-data-liberation-campaign/, 
>> from where the last paragraph was quoted). I'd like to thank John for 
>> replicating his original post there and hope this initiative receives 
>> some support from the OWLG.
>>
>> Certainly, making these resources available under a research license 
>> would not be sufficient in the eyes of many on the list, but it would 
>> definitely be an important (and more easily achievable) step towards 
>> the further liberation of linguistic data.
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Christian
>> -- 
>> Christian Chiarcos
>> Information Sciences Institute
>> University of Southern California
>> 4676 Admiralty Way #1001
>> Marina del Rey, CA 90292
>> tel: +1-310-448-9391
>> fax: +1-310-448-8599
>> http://purl.org/chiarcos/home
>> chiarcos at isi.edu
>>
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>

-- 
John Judge

Centre for Next Generation Localisation
META-NET CIO

Email: jjudge at computing.dcu.ie
Phone: +353 1 700 6729
Mob: +353 87 218 9093
Skype: jjudge2
http://www.cngl.ie
http://www.meta-net.eu

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