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Ontology rights and licence
Back to Semantic Sensor Network Ontology.
Please do not modify options, but create some new ones instead.
Contents
Option 1: use cc:licence
for every _:x a owl:Ontology in ssnx, sosa, or ssn:
_:x dcterms:rights "Copyright 2009 - 2017 W3C/OGC." ;
cc:licence <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2015/copyright-software-and-document> ;
cc:licence <http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/Software> ;
pro
- ?
cons
- cc stands for creative common. This is not the case of these two licences.
Option 2: use dcterms:licence
for every _:x a owl:Ontology in ssnx, sosa, or ssn:
_:x dcterms:rights "Copyright 2009 - 2017 W3C/OGC." ;
dcterms:license <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2015/copyright-software-and-document> ;
dcterms:license <http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/Software> ;
pro
- less namespaces and prefixes
cons
Comments from Víctor Rodríguez Doncel
On the use of licenses for ontologies
As any attributable intellectual creation, ontologies are protected by copyright; and no practical use can be made of them unless a license permits doing so. Hence, this piece of information is necessary. The following article handles this in depth Legal aspects of linked data.
Representing licenses in ontologies
Using any of the properties mentioned in Option1 (cc:license or dct:license) is a common practice and suffices.
If needed, There is even a unofficial RDF dataset that already includes the representation of the most common licenses and that could be used to represent them as Linked Data:
On the W3C and OGC licenses
The terms and conditions in the "OGC Software" and "W3C SOFTWARE AND DOCUMENT NOTICE AND LICENSE" licenses are essentially the same (only the entity to be attributed changes) except for a few words ("All Rights Reserved") which can be found in the former and contradict the rest of the license (see next section).
Having two licenses is not a common practice; usually several licenses are offered, allowing to choose one of them.
If the intention is to say that both W3C and OGC must be attributed, the best option would be to create a unified text and say that explicitly (since both licenses are quite the same).
On the inconsistency of the OGC license
The OGC license includes the statement "All Rights reserved" that is contradicting all the statements above about "Permission to use, copy, and modify this software and its documentation, with or without modification, for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted...".
This is something that is not in the hands of the working group, but maybe someone should take a loot at it.
