Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["Nathan Yergler" <nathan AT creativecommons.org>]

I've completed reworking the gen_licenses.py script for liblicense and
have committed updated versions of the RDF to the repository in the
nyergler-rdf-sanity branch.  I'd like to thank Scott and Jason for
their work this summer that made this possible.  Going through their
script actually revealed a couple of painful bugs in my own code, and
I feel much better about the entire endeavor having re-worked things.

So a couple of additional changes were made:

* There's now a cc:legalcode assertion that explicitly points to the
legalcode URI for each license
* Deprecated licenses have a cc:deprectedOn assertion to state when
they were deprecated; this is an XSD:Date formatted value
* Ported licenses have a cc:jurisdiction assertion; this is a URI
pointing someplace a parser could (theoretically) retrieve additional
information about the jurisdiction
* dc:creator is now specified as a URI; again, the hope is that
additional metadata could be specified @ that URI.
* dc:publisher has been omitted.

A bit more about that final item: after discussing things with people
here at CC, we came to the conclusion that dc:publisher was pretty
vague and probably not all that useful at this point.  When you think
about it, it's meta-metadata (metadata about the RDF itself, not the
license), so I'm proposing we remove it.  This also implies we remove
the associated API from liblicense.

I'd like to hear feedback on this final item in particular.
Objections?  Is it being used in a way I'm not aware of?  Any
feedback, etc welcome.

Thanks.

Nathan