discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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

Asheesh and I were discussing this morning how to continue to make our
RDF metadata drive the systems here at Creative Commons.  One are that
is still fairly hard-coded is the images used by the license chooser,
API, OpenOffice.org Addon, etc.  There's a fairly simple
transformation you can do to find base of the image URL for a given
license, but you still have to know what to append to that to get the
specific image you want.  And you need to know the transformation in
the first place.  Finally, it's doesn't work at all for non-Creative
Commons licenses.  The solution seems to be to add the image
information to the license metadata.

Our proposal is to use foaf:Image (see http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/) to
represent the individual license icons and exif:width and exif:height
(see http://www.w3.org/2003/12/exif/) to encode the dimensions.
Images would be asserted as the foaf:logo property of the license.
For example:

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> <foaf:logo>
<http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png>.
<http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png> <exif:width> "88".
<http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png> <exif:height> "31".

Feedback, suggestions, objections welcome.  We're going to prototype
this for our demo in a couple weeks at OSCON; if all goes well and we
don't hear any objections, we'll roll it out into the public metadata
as well.

Nathan