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cc-metadata - Re: Creative Commons (fwd)

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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Andy Powell <a.powell AT ukoln.ac.uk>
  • To: Aaron Swartz <me AT aaronsw.com>
  • Cc: Stu Weibel <weibel AT oclc.org>
  • Cc: metadata AT creativecommons.org
  • Subject: Re: Creative Commons (fwd)
  • Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 23:06:09 +0000 (GMT)

On Sat, 8 Mar 2003, Aaron Swartz wrote:

Hi, Aaron,
thanks for the response...

> > I think it is important to agree how we should encode the same
> > information in plain XML and HTML <meta> tags.
>
> Why? What are your use cases for this? I'm concerned that further
> proliferation of encoding formats will just cause headaches for
> everyone.

Hmmm... I guess we could get into a long debate on this, which probably
wouldn't be very constructive. But anyway, here's my view...

There is no 'further proliferation' - the proliferation has already
happened. Rightly or wrongly, there are people out there who are not
encoding their metadata in RDF/XML. The most significant example, to my
mind, is the use of DC in XML in the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
But there are also plenty of examples of people continuing to encode
metadata in HTML meta tags. I think that the world would be a better
place if we could agree how to use CC licences in those syntaxes - rather
than taking an explicit technical/political position that people who
choose syntaxes other than RDF/XML have somehow made the 'wrong' decision.

> > My concern is that CC have defined dc:rights to be 'The cc:Agent who
> > holds
> > the copyright on the resource'. This is somewhat at odds with our
> > definition of dc:rights because a simple personal or corporate 'name'
> > is
> > not really 'Information about rights held in and over the resource'.
>
> Yes, I'm somewhat concerned about this also. It was Eric Miller who
> proposed this, as I recall.

Well, let's blame Eric then :-). The point is that it looks pretty
clearly broken to me :-(.

> > I would prefer to see dc:rights being used to carry the URI [...]
>
> Why not a cc:license subproperty?

Why invent a new property when one isn't needed? The semantics of
dc:rights quite clearly state that it can carry a URI for a rights
statement. That is what a CC URI is. The CC URIs are explicitly CC URIs
- because of the domain part of the URI. So the use of cc:license simply
duplicates information that is already available in the URI?

> > I also wonder if the content at the CC licence URIs should be plain
> > text,
> > HTML (as now), RDF/XML or ODRL/XML (or some other form of rights markup
> > language) - or if content negotiatioon could be used to determine what
> > is
> > served at those URIs.
>
> We currently use content negotiation to decide between HTML and
> RDF/XML.

Good.

> We're not interested in any "rights markup language" designed
> for enforcement; all of our licenses explicitly prohibit technical
> enforcement measures.

Well, whatever the background of languages like ODRL, they can be used to
encode all kinds of licences.

I think there are significant 'political' advatages in encoding CC
licences in languages like ODRL, because it gets 'open' licences used
within a community that *may* only be thinking in terms of fairly closed
licences currently.

> > Overall, I think it is important that we (DCMI) enter into some
> > constructive dialogue with the Creative Commons.
>
> Agreed. Please don't mistake my terseness for a combative attitude; I'm
> quite interested in working together.

Good... thanks,

Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933
Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/







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