Christian, Gerard, all -- On Mar 22, 2010, at 08:32 AM, Cristian Consonni wrote: > I am sorry to have started such a mess! -_-
You didn't start it. And in fact, you've performed a service by bringing this discussion back to the fore. Part of the challenge here is that DBpedia is comprised of several things, and the differentiation between the various elements (and their different licenses!) hasn't been made clear. The DBpedia extractors, the code which is run to pull data from the Wikipedia Infoboxes, are (I believe) GPLed. These are software in the relatively traditional sense, and the licensing is relatively easy to understand. The DBpedia servers, the code which is run to provide the SPARQL, SNORQL, and other interfaces to the data, and the code which is run to hold that data (e.g., OpenLink Virtuoso), is licensed in various ways. Again, this is software in the traditional sense, and the licenses are fairly easily understood However, the triples which are produced by those extractors, the *data* which is held in Virtuoso, is a derivative work based on Wikipedia. This collection (copyrightable, etc.) of facts (not inherently copyrightable) is released (as of DBpedia v3.4) under the CC-SA, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, 3.0 license and the GNU Free Documentation License. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License> <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html> The clauses of the CC-SA license particularly relevant to this discussion are -- - Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.) - Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license. Linked Data being something of a new world, I (and many others) have suggested that a literal attribution is not satisfactory Attribution, but that URI integrity should generally be preserved, and anywhere a new URI is minted (especially where the new URI is used instead of the original), an RDF relationship should be declared to the originating URI -- which may demand that a new Relationship be built into some ontology, e.g., basedOn, derivedFrom, or something along these lines. The basic point being -- if you pull data from Wikipedia, you should point back there. If you pull data from DBpedia, you should point back *there* (and DBpedia, in turn, points back to Wikipedia). This way, provenance is maintained, and credit is given where it is due. Thus far, DBpedia has not posted these requirements in clear fashion; that's an error, I think. Nonetheless -- best practice, good manners, and the spirit underlying most FOSS projects including Wikipedia, all demand that attribution be appropriate to the medium. In print, a simple literal statement is fine. In machine-readable data, the attribution should likewise be machine-readable. Your thoughts on the above are welcome.... Best regards, Ted -- A: Yes. http://www.guckes.net/faq/attribution.html | Q: Are you sure? | | A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. | | | Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? Ted Thibodeau, Jr. // voice +1-781-273-0900 x32 Evangelism & Support // mailto:[email protected] // http://twitter.com/TallTed OpenLink Software, Inc. // http://www.openlinksw.com/ 10 Burlington Mall Road, Suite 265, Burlington MA 01803 http://www.openlinksw.com/weblogs/uda/ OpenLink Blogs http://www.openlinksw.com/weblogs/virtuoso/ http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen/ Universal Data Access and Virtual Database Technology Providers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
