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How to describe and refer to licences?
- URIs for well-known licences
- Use of licence type vocabulary
The indication of a licence is recommended for the Catalogue and for Distributions through the use of the property dct:license. In addition, the property dct:type with a value from the ADMS licence type vocabulary is recommended for the Licence Document that is the object of the property dct:license.
DCAT-AP includes a note in section 5.4 which states that implementers are encouraged to use widely recognised licences such as Creative Commons licences, and in particular the CC Zero Public Domain Dedication, the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL), the ISA Open Metadata Licence, the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) and open government licences such as the UK Open Government Licence.
However, it has been noted that more specific advice on how to express a licence document and how to apply the licence type vocabulary for the mentioned licences and for locally defined licences.
This would help implementers to choose the right way of expressing licences and increase interoperability across implementations.
This issue has been reported by Matthias Palmer:
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/mailman/archives/dcat_application_profile/2016-January/000356.html
Comments
DCAT-AP v1.1 includes a section on licence vocabularies. That section states:
Concerning licence vocabularies, implementers are encouraged to use widely recognised licences such as Creative Commons licences[1], and in particular the CC Zero Public Domain Dedication[2], the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)[3], the ISA Open Metadata Licence[4], the European Union Public Licence (EUPL)[5] or an open government licence such as the UK Open Government Licence[6].
Further activities in this area are undertaken by the Open Data Institute[7] with the Open Data Rights Statement Vocabulary[8] and by the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Initiative[9].
It would be useful to know which approaches are being taken by the implementations of DCAT-AP. In particular, the following aspects are of interest:
[1] Creative Commons. About The Licenses. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
[2] Creative Commons. CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
[3] Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/
[4] ISA Open Metadata Licence v1.1, https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/category/licence/isa-open-metadata-licence-v11
[5] European Commission. Joinup. Open Source Software. European Union Public Licence (EUPL). http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl
[6] The National Archives. Open Government Licence for public sector information. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/2/
[7] Open Data Institute. http://www.theodi.org/
[8] Open Data Institute. Open Data Rights Statement Vocabulary. http://schema.theodi.org/odrs/
[9] Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Initiative. http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/
In .be there is a mix of CC0, CC-BY, Etalab (Brussels City) and "specific" licenses which are basically rebranded versions of CC0 / CC-BY (or very close). Or even "unknown / not specified"...
Proposed resolution:
Observation: Licence types are not commonly provided
We support this proposal. We have use cases with multiple licences. We would need to release the constraint about dcat:licence which has to be unique.
Jean on behalf of OP/OpenDataPortal