[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Only one part of rights management for digital geospatial content and
services has anything to do with enforcement (e.g. authorization).
Communication, attribution, acknowledgement, provenance, quality, and
appropriate use are the focus of many use cases which do not involve
any of the enforcement schemes which seem to rile certain people so
much.
.....
The point of the present GeoDRM work, however some might want to
demonize it on the basis of the term, is first and foremost to define
a system of rights information (metadata and protocols) which lets
anyone who uses geospatial intellectual property, communicate and be
clear on the terms of that use. This seems to me in the end a clearer
and more effective way of documenting unfairness in particular
protection schemes and moving toward more fair, less proprietary
systems, than cracking them and ranting about them, but that's just
my preference.
As has been pointed there are lot of uselful technical pieces to be
worked out in the area of rights management that have nothing to do with
restrictive TCM mechanisms. It's hard to talk about "digital rights
management" without the discussion shifting to "DRM". Working in a
library environment we have to put a lot of effort into keeping track of
rights associated with content (or services) which we have aquired or
provide access to. One of the things that's always frustrated me about
the geospatial industry is that it has not adopted a packaging or
wrapper scheme in the way that other some information sectors have or
are in the process of doing (METS in libraries; IMS-CP in learning
technologies; MPEG 21 DIDL in multimedia; XFDU in space data,
etc.)--many or most of these being open in nature.
So we get a dataset (which may be multi-file or come in versions), it's
metadata, additional documentation, ancillary data or attribute tables,
a license, a disclaimer, project or legend files, etc. This dataset may
arrive on some device along with a lot of other datasets, usually mixed
up together in directories as a sort of file soup, making content
exchange a far from seamless process. Aside from all of the problems
with isolating the individual datasets and their accompanying parts,
there is the problem of associating our own rights information or
licensing with the acquired data. We cannot add this rights information
directly to the metadata record because that would adulterate the
original producer rights statement (our specific rights situation often
being different than the general situation for the dataset as
produced)--and anyway that's not something an application can read to
determine rights. But using content packaging (or wrappers) we can wrap
our own administrative metadata (when and how we acquired the data, our
specific rights, etc.) technical metadata (what was the transfer
mechanism, checksum confirmation, did we do anything to the data, etc.)
around the data and all of its parts. The rights information itself can
be encoded using a rights expression language (REL), so we can have an
application sort out the rights situation rather than have humans read
the agreements as we manage the archive. There some RELs out there
(ODRL, xRML, MPEG 21 REL, METS REL, etc.) in different content domains
and I think recall seeing some comparing and contrasting of these in
some early GeoDRM discussion docs. Anyway, all of this can be done
without ever necessarily making the data inaccessible.
As I recall the GeoDRM thread in OWS (3?) included use cases for static
files (with most GeoDRM activity focused on services), so I'm curious
how the content packaging/wrapper piece is playing out in dealing with
those use cases. In our digital preservation work we are exploring
using content packaging to handle the problem of tying a dataset to all
of its accompanying "stuff"--but content packaging could also play into
setting up routinized content exchange networks (which have a rights
component) and likely plays into GeoDRM for static files as well. When
the GeoDRM initiative started my first thought wasn't that the data
would be less accessible (I'm aware of a lot data that is underused or
underexposed because of inadequate clarity about rights) but that maybe
the industry would finally be forced to address the packaging
problem--with non-rights spinoff benefits for those engaged in the
content exchange processes.
Steve
--
Steve Morris
Head of Digital Library Initiatives
North Carolina State University Libraries
Phone: (919) 515-1361 Fax: (919) 515-3031
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
Geowanking mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
