[open-science] Open Science Microformats/Pattern languages? was Re: Launch of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science + Is It Open Data?

Fri Feb 26 12:28:31 UTC 2010

Thanks to John and Rufus for resolving this.

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:59 PM, John Wilbanks <
wilbanks at creativecommons.org> wrote:

> * This can be done in a whole variety of ways including microformats,
>> embedding RDFa etc. The simplest, IMO, is to put license or a pointer
>> to the license in some prominent location relative to the data. (NB: I
>> am sceptical that you will be able actually to embed the license
>> information directly into the data in many cases -- realistically the
>> license is going to be "along-side" the data in some sense, either
>> because it is recorded in a dedicated set of metadata fields -- as in
>> an institutional repository -- or in a separate README.txt ).
>
>
> Yup. It's not like an mp3 or a pdf file, where you can embed. Not to
> mention that huge swaths of data will never leave their homes, but will
> instead be queried via SPARQL without any copying ever happening!
>
> Like I said, CC0, PDDL, handwritten notes, whatever. The thing is to be
> legally clear :-)
>
> I agree about the problem of the physical separation of the data and
licence. In some cases there is little escape from accompanyinig the data
with a LICENSE.txt. On the positive side there are many compound formats
where it should be relatively easy to embed enough mechanics *in* the
document. I can think of:
* XHTML
* XML; various XMLs (MathML, CML, SVG, etc.)
* DOCX
* PDF (XMP)
* Excel as .XSLX
* PPTX

There is then an implicit assertion that everything in the container is
DATA. For me this works - it's a good way of a scientist asserting that any
text is not a creative work but a necessary part of the data.

If others like this idea then I can see us creating a number of "howtos" for
common formats. I am particulartly keen on embedding this in images (PNGs,
etc.)

> --
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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