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  • From: Nathan Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu>
  • Cc: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Finding a license description
  • Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:19:14 -0800

Great; I think we need to do some thinking here about what we have
accurate translation strings for; it may be that we should be
publishing descriptions for the license properties, not the licenses
themselves. I've opened a ticket to track this
(http://code.creativecommons.org/issues/issue163).

Nathan

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu> wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
>
> Thanks for your replies.  The sum of the parts is fine.  It doesn't have to
> be a single sentence.  But we're looking for a short paragraph that
> describes the license.  If we get that by concatenating descriptions of the
> various parts, so be it.
>
> Jim
>
>
>
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 4:55 PM, Nathan Yergler wrote:
>
>> Hi Jim --
>>
>> So the problem here is that the RDF you're looking at was generated
>> programmatically from existing systems.  One of our ongoing
>> goals/challenges is to make reality match what we claim; that is, that
>> the RDF is the canonical representation of the license.  I'm happy to
>> report that we're going to be putting some directed effort into this
>> in the next month or so, but I expect there will be some rough spots.
>> Like this one.  The reason there's no description for the "compound"
>> licenses is that the descriptions you're seeing are actually for the
>> particular license elements (ie, "BY" or "NC"), not the entire
>> license.  I suppose to make the RDF match reality we should purge all
>> of those dc:description elements, since calling them the description
>> of the license is potentially inaccurate.
>>
>> It might be useful to find out what you expect a reasonable value of
>> dc:description for a License would be.  If it's a one sentence summary
>> of the license, I'm not sure we have an analogous "feature" right now
>> on the site.
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> I am looking at the license metadata from the licenses directory of
>>> the liblicense-0.8.1 zip file.  I'm wondering about the logic for
>>> finding a license description.  The metadata defines 376 licenses, and
>>> only a few of them have "dc:description" elements.  Those with
>>> descriptions are the simple licenses ("by", "nc", "nd", "sa").  The
>>> composite licenses (e.g. "by-nc-nd", "by-nc-sa", "by-nc", "by-nd-nc",
>>> "by-nd", "by-sa", "nc-sa") do not contain definition elements.
>>
>>>
>>> Suppose I want to display an plain-English (or plain-French or plain-
>>> Chinese or whatever locale my user requires) description of a "by-nc-
>>> nd" license for a particular jurisdiction.  I would start with the
>>> most recent version of that license for the jurisdiction (2.5 in most
>>> cases or 3.0 if the jurisdiction is the USA) and find that it does not
>>> have a description.  So do I then look for the three licenses ("by",
>>> "nc" and "nd") and combine their descriptions to get the description
>>> of "by-nc-nd"?
>>>
>>> If the answer to the last question is "yes", here's a follow-up
>>> question: It looks like the most recent general description of "by" is
>>> 3.0, but most (or all?) of the licenses for separate jurisdictions
>>> have descriptions in version 2.5. Which should we use -- the
>>> description for the preferred locale for the general 3.0 "by" license
>>> or the description for the preferred locale for the specific
>>> jurisdiction's 2.5 "by" license?  For "nc" and "nd", do I use the 1.0
>>> version unless the jurisdiction is "jp", in which case, do I use the
>>> 2.0 description?
>>>
>>> The metadata in the license files seems to be silent on the question
>>> of how to find an appropriate description unless it's included in the
>>> license itself (or in a license referenced in an "isReplacedBy" tag or
>>> a "source" tag). By that I mean that the metadata for version 3.0 of
>>> the "by-nc-nd" license makes no reference to any prior versions or to
>>> the "by", "nc" or "nd" licenses.  That makes me wonder if the plain-
>>> language description for a particular locale and jurisdition is
>>> defined somewhere else?
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>>>
>>> Jim
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> cc-devel mailing list
>>> cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
>>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>
>




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