discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Thomas Winningham <winningham AT gmail.com>]

Nathan,

I watched several Google Tech Talks about localization, and I also
spent some time with RDFa when it was coming out. The general focus
was naturally then respectively for end user browsing, and then
automated agents.

In each of these, the first line is to go by the headers in the
requests and responses as much as possible, so the http header of the
sites hosting the rdfa should have headers that represent what
languages the license is translated into, and likewise should try to
respect the wishes of the requester's header as to what languages they
accept. This would be the magic dereferencing part, and mostly what I
remember on how conversations went on the lists and IRC towards how
RDFa should not be like that per se, but rather have the related
content links and some of the other methods they published, or just
going with what works between two parties. This seemed to pertain
specifically to automated agents, web servers, and other machines
looking to dereference.

The talks go to make the distinction of edge cases where the user is
ambiguous on language preference, or is otherwise multilingual, in
which case in the presentation of the display, you ought to allow
persistent visual choices like flags or drop downs.

So, I personally think that at the very least the license hosting
should behave with the auto-detection, and they you're right how else
to describe the relationships, because that is useful information that
should bubble up into systems that eventually display the language
availability, and I personally would go with the FRBR model because it
is the closest to what you are looking for and the other exactly like
you say would almost need more definition, but I am not a legal
person, so I don't know about the implications, but I would guess most
anything is a creative endeavor.

I would say in short go for the content header parts since RDFa is
most likely being consumed by an automated agent, short of that I like
the more specific predicates.

Thanks!

Thomas

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 6:36 PM, Nathan Yergler
<nathan AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> The CC license deeds are available in many languages, and users
> sometimes link to the language-specific deed (ie,
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.es). We want to ensure
> that we're publishing RDFa describing the license itself, and not a
> translation. We also want to make sure agents can follow their nose
> from the translation to the actual license. The question we're trying
> to answer is what predicates to use to model that translation
> relationship. Things I've looked at:
>
> * Dublin Core doesn't seem to have anything translation-specific
> (although hasVersion/isVersionOf --
> http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-hasVersion --
> looks like it'd be a reasonable generic approach, or something to
> refine if we do our own).
>
> * One instantiation of the FRBR model,
> http://vocab.org/frbr/core.html, includes translation and
> translationOf predicates
> (http://vocab.org/frbr/core.html#translation). This would imply the
> Licenses are "creative or artistic endeavors".
>
> Is anyone aware of something that's "obviously" the right thing to
> use? Any opinions on the above options?
>
> Thanks,
>
> NRY
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