Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Robert Gust‐Bardon <ea4xgr AT gmail.com>]

Dear Subscribers,

My name is Robert Gust‐Bardon. I am a doctoral student at the Military
University of Technology in Warsaw. I would like to take part in the
Google Summer of Code 2010. My idea for the project for the Creative
Commons is the following:

Creative Commons runs a Web application (developed as a Google Summer of
Code 2008 project) called the License Validation Service which allows
its users to extract the license information found at a Web page and
present the result in a human‐readable manner. This project seeks to
introduce several enhancements to this service, such as an enrichment of
its user interface, support for additional statements, improvements
related to the parsing, and making the Web application more user‐
friendly.

When it comes to the enhancements to be done until the midterm
evaluation, I would like to introduce the following improvements:
― the usage of a different background color depending on whether no
license information could be found or an improvement in the way metadata
are expressed is possible;
― the Web application would support the CC Network
<https://creativecommons.net/> OSCRI <http://oscri.org/> registration;
― the Web application would display additional information about the
licensed resources by taking into account the following properties:
DC:title, cc:attributionName, cc:attributionURL (URI) cc:morePermissions
(URI), cc:jurisdiction (URI), cc:legalcode (URI), cc:deprecatedOn
(date);
― the Web application would suggest an improvement over the deprecated
means of stating the license information (such as RDF/XML in an HTML
comment), should such means be used—a user could be redirected to a wiki
page describing the RDFa method;
― the Web application would be renamed to “License Extraction Service”
in order to better reflect the its purpose.

When it comes to the enhancements to be done until the final evaluation,
I would like to introduce the following improvements:
― fixing two bugs related to the parsing of metadata (discovered by Mr.
Hans Loepfe on February 28th, 2009);
― the Web application would determine the base URI supporting CURIE, the
“xml:base” attribute, the Content‐Location HTTP header (this is
technically a bug fix, since resolving the base URI is required by the
standards in use);
― the user interface would be improved, so that it is animated and uses
tabs powered by a jQuery extension; should an ECMAScript engine be
turned off, a graceful degradation will occur, so that the tool remains
usable <http://robert.gust-bardon.org/ui.tar.gz>;
― the Web application would validate the statements about the license
when they would be described within the cc:License RDF or RDFa (see
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Extend_Metadata#Conclusions);
― should a CC license be used or a license that would be described using
supported predicates (such as cc:permits, cc:requires, cc:prohibits), a
summary of the rights of the user would be displayed in a human‐readable
manner;
― the Web application would suggest an improvement over the deprecated
means of stating the license information (such as RDF/XML in an HTML
comment), should such means be used—an RDFa source code would be
automatically generated for him/her based on the RDF/XML found
<http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Extend_Metadata#Conclusions>;
― the answers to the frequently asked questions would be included in the
Web application (see <http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html>).

Additionally, should there be some spare time left, I would like to
introduce the following improvements:
― the URLs appearing in the license would be checked in order to report
dead links to the users;
― the Web application would automatically detect the MIME type of the
document and allow its users to override it;
― the Web application would support the license information included in
RSS feeds;
― the Web application would support the license information embedded in
multimedia files (via liblicense);
― the Web application would parse languages other than RDF/XML and RDFa
(such as Notation 3, Turtle, and N-Triples);
― both the developer documentation and the code documentation would be
improved.

I am looking forward to getting feedback from the community on this
idea.

Regards,

-- 
Robert Gust‐Bardon

http://robert.gust-bardon.org/

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