[Seavox] Vocabulary usage request

[John Graybeal]

Hi Roy,

Great question.  It depends a lot on whether the material would be publicly visible.

If it is able to be in Freebase without being publicly visible, then I don't see an issue.

If it is publicly visible, I think you established a good principle a while back, when we wanted to serve some of that information from MMI's repository. Your response at the time was (approximately) that it could be OK to do that, if we were able to guarantee our copy stayed synchronized to yours.  I think that's an important stipulation.

A second factor to consider is whether the addition of the material effectively creates a new set of URLs that duplicate the semantic content (in an RDF way) of your system's URLs.  If Freebase did that (not sure if it does), then it would be great to indicate these are not the primary URLs to reference these concepts.  (An even more indirect scenario is that someone harvests all the Freebase content into LinkedData and/or semantic data, creating another duplication loop.)  Limiting undesirable duplication of semantic content, that may be useful to the community in the end.

In MMI and OOI, we have been having quite a bit of research and discussion about licensing and similar IP concerns.  (References on request.)  I notice your citation doesn't actually specify the applicable license for re-use, if any.  So if someone else spotted your citation on Freebase or elsewhere—or at least as likely, their computer spots it—there is no reason or technology (other than good faith) for them to carry forward your citation into the *next* copy.  On the other hand, by not saying "Anyone can use this" (perhaps a mantra of Freebase), users may be in doubt about what license actually applies. 

So if there is a clear usage license you liked, it would be good to specify it in the citation.  But really, the whole licensing situation is terrible for this kind of data, and in the end I think "all data wants to be free" will be the prevailing model in most cases.  So time spent license-smithing may have limited value at best anyway.  

I hope the model adopted by Seavox will allow reasonable re-use in almost all cases, and can accommodate a fair amount of flexibility, while preserving some integrity of the referenced information and its root source.

John

On Nov 24, 2010, at 08:31, Lowry, Roy K. wrote:

> Dear All,
>  
> I have been approached by Alex Dorsk from the MBLWHOI library with the request to upload a copy of several vocabularies into Freebase to allow him to access the information using tools linked to Freebase. 
>  
> One of the vocabularies is the Salt and Freshwater Body gazetteer (C19) which is under SeaVoX governance.
>  
> Two questions:
>  
> (1) Should we allow this?
> (2) If the answer is yes what form of citation do we require? The citation requested by SeaDataNet for a similar vocabulary is:
>  
> Resource name: Ports Gazetteer
> Author: DOD, BSH Hamburg
> Content Governance authority: SeaDataNet Technical Task Team
> Licensor: SeaDataNet Consortium
> Version: 22
> Publication date: 2010-11-10
> URI: http://vocab.ndg.nerc.ac.uk/list/C381/22/
>  
>  
> Opinions please.
>  
> Cheers, Roy.
>  
>  
> 
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John Graybeal   <mailto:jgraybeal at ucsd.edu> 
phone: 858-534-2162
System Development Manager
Ocean Observatories Initiative Cyberinfrastructure Project: http://ci.oceanobservatories.org
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org   

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