Re: OCLC recommends Open Data Commons Attribution License

From: Karen Coyle <lists_at_nyob>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 18:06:09 -0700
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
On 9/11/12 3:12 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> I know what 'provenance' means, come on.

I didn't say you didn't. Sorry if you misunderstood.

>
> Yes, I understand if one statement comes from Amazon and another from 
> OCLC, they could have seperate attribution/provenance. You're missing 
> my potential cases.
>
> i start out ingesting data from OCLC into my system. Okay, the title 
> statement "Makbeth" comes from OCLC, and needs attribution/provenance 
> data there to comply with their license.

No, read their license. There is no attribution on the records or data 
elements. ODC-BY refers to the database, and OCLC gives this as the form 
of attribution:

  * The recommended form of attribution for WorldCat is:

        "This [title of report or article or dataset or service]
        contains OCLC WorldCat <http://www.worldcat.org/> information
        made available under the ODC Attribution License
        <http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/>. The OCLC
        Cooperative requests that uses of WorldCat derived data
        contained in this work conform with the WorldCat Community Norms
        <http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/recorduse/policy/odcbynorms.htm>"

  * Special cases: In circumstances where providing the full attribution
    statement above is not technically feasible, the use of canonical
    WorldCat URIs is adequate to satisfy Section 4.3 of the ODC
    Attribution License <http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/>

So I don't think your hypothetical fits this case.

>
> >
> > Again, I'm a bit confused. Are you thinking that linked data provenance
> > would be used in licensing OCLC data? I haven't heard anything that
> > would imply that
>
> I may the one that's confused, but I thought that was what we were 
> talking about!  This thread is about OCLC's recommendation to use an 
> attribution license. In at least some places, OCLC claims to be 
> licensing their data under an ODC-BY license requiring attribution 
> already.

Not in the way that they are requiring it -- again, read their 
documentation. Attribution is on the data set, not individual data, and 
you only need to say that "WorldCat data was used in this project."

>
> I think the linked data provenance work is neat and I'm glad they are 
> doing; I think it's unfortunate for OCLC to license data, or recommend 
> others license days, in such a way that many uses will require such 
> fairly innovative technology to comply with the license.

Again, read the license documentation at:

http://www.oclc.org/us/en/data/attribution.html

There is no requirement to use element-level provenance. Unfortunately, 
none of the press releases included a link to this attribution page, and 
I still cannot find it by following links on the site. I was pointed to 
it by Richard Wallis; it's possible that the authors of the blog post 
had not seen that because their assumptions about attribution do not, 
IMO, match this documentation.

I agree that PDDL would be cleaner than ODC-BY, but neither applies to 
individual records or data points. OCLC simply asks for attribution in 
your site or project documentation. Note that Harvard does include such 
attribution [1], so even though they have said "CC0" on their data, they 
are very close to what OCLC asks for, and OCLC admits that. [2]

kc
[1] http://openmetadata.lib.harvard.edu/bibdata/useterms
[2] http://hangingtogether.org/?p=1647

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Tue Sep 11 2012 - 21:07:28 EDT