Re: attaching multiple licenses

On Sun, 2009-12-06 at 19:40 +0100, Georgi Kobilarov wrote:
> Say I publish one URI for an artist:
> http://example.org/resource/Madonna
> 
> I aggregate information from multiple sources about that artist, and
> those sources have different licenses. One triple comes from a source
> under GNU FDL, another triple from a source under Public Domain, and a
> owl:sameas link which I want to publish under Creative Commons
> License. 

Two methods spring to mind. The first is reification. It's probably not
an excellent solution though - consumers would need to be specially
aware of the fact that you're using reification, and that they should
dereify your data.

Something like:

 [ a rdf:Statement ;
   rdf:subject <http://example.org/resource/Madonna> ;
   rdf:predicate <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> ;
   rdf:object "Madonna Veronica Louise Chicone" ;
   ex:statementLicence </public-___domain-declaration> ] .

A better solution might be to publish your data in a format that can
make use of multiple graphs. e.g. in N3:

 {
   <http://example.org/resource/Madonna>
     <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name>
       "Madonna Veronica Louise Chicone"
 }
   ex:graphLicence </public-___domain-declaration> .

Unfortunately, most of the data formats with native support for named
graphs do not have very good support in consuming software. But you can
fake named graphs in formats like RDF/XML, Turtle, etc by simply
splitting your data into multiple documents. So, in one file, you'd
have:

 <http://example.org/resource/Madonna>
   <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name>
     "Madonna Veronica Louise Chicone" .
 <>
   ex:graphLicence
     </public-___domain-declaration> .

And in other files, you'd publish your other statements under different
licenses. You'd use rdfs:seeAlso links between the files to enable
autodiscovery.

Of course, because of the nature of public ___domain data, you could
duplicate that data in your other two files, so that any tool fetching,
say just the GNU FDL data would get the public ___domain data too.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Monday, 7 December 2009 06:41:11 UTC