Future of the Web for Collaborative Science

W3C Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Sciences.

Eric Prud'hommeaux, Sanitation Engineer. Last modified: $Date: 2010/04/26 15:49:34 $

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, with attribution to W3C.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information.
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information.
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

Mashups become queries.

SERVICE <http://uu3.org:8888/7tm_receptors>
  {
    ?iuphar  iface:family      ?family .
    ?iuphar  iface:code	       ?code .
    ?iuphar  iface:iupharName  ?iupharNm .
    ?human   iface:iuphar      ?iuphar .
    ?human   iface:geneName    "GABBR1" .
    ?human   iface:entrezGene  ?humanEntrez .
  }
SERVICE <http://dbpedia.org/sparql?default-graph-uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org&should-sponge=&>

  {
     _:gene  dbp:entrezgene    ?humanEntrez ;
             rdfs:label        ?label ;
    FILTER (lang(?label) = "en")
  }
SERVICE <http://hcls.deri.org/atag/data/gabab_example.html>
  {
     ?topic  rdfs:label        ?label .
     ?post   sioc:topic        ?topic
  }

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

What enables collaboration?

How do we share information?

Tag information.
Structure information
Link information.
Access information.

Panel

Hilary Spencer — Nature Publishing
Puneet Kishor — Science Commons
Andrew I. Su — GeneWiki
Mike Conlon — VIVO

What attractive mis-steps should we avoid?

Interoperability makes collaboration possible

Legal interoperability
Technological interoperability
Semantic interoperability

Creative Commons makes interoperability possible

By lowering the legal barriers to sharing
By making the existing legal restrictions easy to understand
- by humans
- by lawyers
- by machines

Mixing licenses makes the data less interoperable

Mixed data as free as the least free component

Contract unsuitable for data

Difficult to track
Difficult to enforce
Apply only between consenting parties aka "privity of contract"
Legal requirement potentially a disincentive to use

Converge toward the public domain

Maximize legal interoperability
Allow commercial use
- Science is innovative when the market is able to convert scientific outcome into affordable, commodity products (zipper, ballpoint pen, aspirin, penicilin)
Don't impose share-alike
- "Do as I do" leads to an impasse because I can't foresee all possible future scenarios

Choose PD or CC0

Public Domain (PD) works best when data are completely free of copyrightable elements
CC0 (pronounced "CC Zero") is more appropriate when copyrightable elements and facts are mixed. This is the more usual case

Norms not Contracts

Encourage citation through community norms, not through contracts
Contracts are hard to implement, expensive to enforce
Science is governed by norms
(PD or CC0) + SC Norms help converge data toward public domain