Two recent announcements point the way to the more open world the semantic web — and the Semantic Web — will require if either is to reach its full potential.
On the first count, starting last Thursday, any contributions to the microformats wiki (microformats.org) will be placed into the public domain to make reuse of them as easy and as widespread as possible. Those who have already contributed content are being asked to explicitly place those contributions into the public domain by the end of the month, or to remove them.
Microformats, for those unfamiliar with the term, are positioned as a practical way to add to the semantic richness of the web today. These small bits of code provide a lightweight way of adding simple semantic extensions to web documents, viewable primarily by humans but also understood by machines, to enable the sharing of structured information within web pages. Yahoo! is a big proponent, for example — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews and Flickr, which it bought in 2005, uses microformats to add location metadata to images.
What’s the reason behind the microformats wiki development? According to the announcement posted on the site: “By embracing open standards development in the public domain, we hope other standards bodies and communities who choose to call their efforts ‘open’ are encouraged by the example we set here today to do so as well. The importance of open development of standards for data formats cannot be overstated.”
The notice goes on to say that following posts “will expand on how open standards are essential for open content, data portability, and data longevity.” To explicitly place past contributions into the public domain, members of the microformats community are being asked to edit their user pages to include the Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration template.
Different approach required
There must be something in the air around the idea of openness, as this announcement comes just a few weeks after another news release on the theme, as it relates to the decidedly upper-case Semantic Web. Talis, the U.K.-based developers of the semantic web application platform Talis Platform, announced in December that it had released the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence, which it called the first output of a successful partnership with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons.
The company decided to build in partnership upon the principles of the earlier Talis Community License, in part because certain copyright protections of data and databases that are afforded by the European Parliament don’t apply in jurisdictions such as the U.S.
According to Talis Technology Evangelist Dr. Paul Miller, who was quoted in the release, “A different approach is therefore required if we are to facilitate the widespread availability of data upon which the emerging Semantic Web will depend.”
The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence should provide a “workable and easy to use solution for data integration that will take care of the relevant rights over data and databases,” according to the release.
John Wilbanks, Creative Commons' Vice President responsible for the Science Commons project, was also quoted in the release. He noted that, “For a commercial organisation such as Talis, with a heritage in the business of creating and managing data, to recognise the importance of the 'freedom to integrate' says much about changing attitudes to the ownership and use of data.”
He also noted that the Open Data Commons Licence approach “furthermore implements the norms of data sharing for scientific data, providing the guidance for scientists to act as good citizens without exposing them to lawsuits and lawyers."
Indeed, a recent post on the Open Data Commons blog is entitled “2008 — year of open data.”
With the release of the Science Commons protocol for implementing open access data and the announcement of the CCZero protocol that enables people to assert that a work has no legal restrictions attached to it, as well as waive any rights associated with a work, and with the Talis-funded Open Data Commons project, “it looks like there will be quite a few options on the table for licensing data in an open way this year,” the blog notes. “This is after a long time where there were no good options for those looking at licensing data.”
Looks like the doors are about to open wide. Let’s see what the upper- and lower-case (S or s)emantic web can make of it.
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