[pd-discuss] Difficult question with our interface

[Rufus Pollock]

On 3 February 2010 14:14, Maarten Zeinstra <mz at kl.nl> wrote:
> Hi Rufus,
>
> I thought this last few days were very fruitful and I believe we can have
> success in working together on these calculators.

I agree :)

I've posted up notes about the API that we drafted at the conference
on Monday here:

<http://wiki.okfn.org/PublicDomainCalculators/Api>

> So when I arrived a day late in Amsterdam, all flights were canceled, I
> immediately started trying to make you your API as we discussed on monday.
> I found the following question in the flowcharts/xml that I could not answer
> given the JSON objects we've discussed. How should we deal with these
> questions?
>
> *In which year was this work last substantially changed? (Concerns
> databases)

My view here is that we should exclude DBs for the time being as I
think calculators will hardly ever be used for DBs -- and even it is I
doubt this question will ever be answered by a user and so we would
have to default to a value such as "today" (which would mean the DB
wasn't in the PD ...)

> *How many years of copyright restriction does the country of origin has?

I think this info should be embedded into the calculator rather than
provided by the user -- it is unlikely user will know this.

> *What is the term of protection in your jurisdiction?

Ditto. One possibility would be for this to be standard configuration
information that gets passed to the Calculator class on
initialization.

> *Is one of the authors a citizen of a treaty country?

Now that is getting really obscure. I think we can probably ignore
this in version 1.

> *Is the work first published in its home jurisdiction?

This again is a fairly edge-case issue and I think it would be safe
for us simply to assume an answer of "yes" for the time being.

> I could probably answer the other questions in the flowchart using the work
> and person classes, but not these.

That sounds good. I'm going to work on moving the existing pd
calculators we have at
(http://knowledgeforge.net/pdw/hg/file/67e05551b1e3/pdw/pd.py) to the
new interface we're specing out. I've also almost done with a first
pass at an calculators API.

Regards,

Rufus

PS: I've cc'd in pd-discuss since I think this thread is of general
interest ...
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