[pd-discuss] New developments

Mon Jun 13 07:29:19 UTC 2011

Hello everyone,
after a long period of silence, we are back with some good news:

(1) the Public Domain Calculator library has been cleaned up and is now
ready for further development. Two calculators (UK and France) have been
implemented and are waiting to be reviewed and beta-tested by you all !  ;)

(2) in order to facilitate the process of beta-testing,
http://publicdomainworks.net is back up, now completely integrated with the
bibliographica database. This means that you can search for works and see
their copyright status in the UK and in France. If you are from another
jurisdiction, you will have to find someone to implement that calculator -
17 flowcharts are ready to be implemented, we only need coders..  :)

(3) I have spent the past week at the ICAIL conference on Artificial
Intelligence & Law, where i met lots of people with whom I had the
opportunity to discuss and present the public domain calculators. Interest
and potential collaboration have been expressed at several layers:

--- Tom Gordon, from the Fraunhofer-Institut für Offene
Kommunikationssysteme (FOKUS) has expressed interest in a possible
collaboration with regard to the automatic representation of copyright law
in different jurisdiction into a formal language that could subsequently be
interpreted by a calculator. This could theoretically replace the need of
constructing a flowchart for every jurisdiciton, although further discussion
is necessary to figure out the actual value and viability of such option.

--- Guido Governatori (University of Queensland, Brisbane) and Monica
Palmirani (CIRSFID, Bologna) are currently working on the implementation of
a new standard for RuleML and are keen to use the public domain calculators
as a case study for it. They already provided a preliminary implementation
of the Spanish calculator in a set of logic rules; RuleML is a language that
could theoretically be used as a common ground for every calculator to be
implemented in a different programming language (e.g. in order to create
application plugins and extension). Again, more discussion is required to
understand whether this could actually be generalized to every calculator,
or whether this should remain a test case.

--- the Institute of Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica (ITTIG)
said that they could help us in devising a automated / semantically-aware
system to gather all information that is necessary to determine the status
of a copyright work, but that is missing in the metadata provided by the
database. They said some funding might however be necessary to justify this
work.

Overall, although the interest was high, the time is always the problem..
many said they would spread the word within their academic community to find
out whether some student or researcher would be interested in helping out.
I'll we keep you updated of any future development !
Cheers,
Primavera
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