This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans to open up lots more UK Government data! His speech describes plans to put much more detailed information online under open licenses in 2010.

This includes:

• public services performance data - including on crime, hospitals and schools
• new transport data
• geospatial data from Ordnance survey (as we recently blogged about)

We are very pleased that it looks like the new datasets will be:

1. Released in raw form - as OKF Director Rufus Pollock first blogged about two year ago last month, and alluded to by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at TED.
2. Released in a way which is compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition - i.e. free for anyone to use for any purpose, include commercial.

We’re also very proud that the new data.gov.uk site, the official registry of UK Government open datasets, is powered by CKAN (as we announced a couple of months ago). If you’re interested in following the latest development about this as they happen, please join the official mailing list.

The new Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government initiative gives further detail on how the new data will be published. In particular, section 1.3. Radically opening up data and promoting transparency, gives a set of “public data principles”, which are as follows:

‘Public data’ are ‘government-held non-personal data that are collected or generated in the course of public service delivery’.

Our public data principles state that:

• Public data will be published in reusable, machine-readable form
• Public data will be available and easy to find through a single easy to use online access point (http://www.data.gov.uk/)
• Public data will be published using open standards and following the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium
• Any ‘raw’ dataset will be represented in linked data form
• More public data will be released under an open licence which enables free reuse, including commercial reuse
• Data underlying the Government’s own websites will be published in reusable form for others to use
• Personal, classified, commercially sensitive and third-party data will continue to be protected.

This is fantastic news - and we’ve highlighted key parts of the Prime Minister’s speech below:

Information is the key. An informed citizen is a powerful citizen.

[...] We are determined to be among the first governments in the world to open up public information in a way that is far more accessible to the general public.

So I am grateful to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt for leading a project to ‘make public data public’.

This has enormous potential. Already more than 1,000 active users of the internet have registered their interest in working with government on this, and we have so far made around 1,100 datasets accessible to them.

And there are many hundreds more that can be opened up - not only from central government but also from local councils, the NHS, police and education authorities.

[...] In this way people will no longer be passive recipients of services but, through dialogue and engagement, active participants - shaping, controlling and determining what is best for them.

And I can announce today that we will actively publish all public services performance data online during 2010 completing the process by 2011. Crime data, hospital costs and parts of the national pupil database will go on line in 2010. We will use this data to benchmark the best and the worst and drive better value for money.

It will have a direct effect on how we allocate resources. We will introduce next year NHS tariffs based on best practice on the ground not average price. And we will be benchmarking the whole of the prison and probation system by 2011.

And we will give our frontline services greater freedoms and flexibilities to respond innovatively to this data, reducing the number of ring fenced budgets, rationalising different central funding projects and joining-up capital funding within a local area.

Releasing data can and must unleash the innovation and entrepreneurship at which Britain excels - one of the most powerful forces of change we can harness.

When, for example, figures on London’s most dangerous roads for cyclists were published, an online map detailing where accidents happened was produced almost immediately to help cyclists avoid blackspots and reduce the numbers injured.

And after data on dentists went live, an iphone application was created to show people where the nearest surgery was to their current location.

And from April next year ordnance survey will open up information about administrative boundaries, postcode areas and mid-scale mapping.

All of this will be available for free commercial re-use, enabling people for the first time to take the material and easily turn it into applications, like fix my street or the postcode paper.

And I can further announce today that, again from next April, we will also release public transport data hitherto inaccessible or expensive and release significant underlying data for weather forecasts for free download and re-use.

We are currently working on a new project which will map open government data initiatives from around the world. We are also working on a guidance document for opening up government data, and starting a new working group on open government data to promote technical and legal standards, as well as to help document what open government data is out there. If you’re interested in any of this, we’d love to hear from you!

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1. US Government announces more open government data!
2. Australian government releases open data for MashupAustralia competition
3. Mapping open government data initiatives around the world

1. Whether datasets are open as in the Open Knowledge Definition - i.e. whether they explicitly say that they can be used by anyone, for any purpose, without restriction (except perhaps attribution, integrity or sharealike requirements).
2. Whether or not there are facilities to download raw data in bulk - i.e. whether they easily allow users to directly download all the data in open, machine readable formats.

We’ve now got 16 packages with the city tag on CKAN, our open-source registry of open data:

• http://ckan.net/tag/read/city

United States

Boston

• Background: Boston’s Datahub was mentioned in this post on open data in different cities from October 2009.
• Open?: There is no explicit notice saying the data is open.
• Bulk download?: No bulk download available.
• More information:
  • http://www.ckan.net/package/city-boston-gis-datahub
  • http://www.ckan.net/package/metroboston-datacommon

Chicago

• Background: Mentioned in this blog post from May 2009, and this blog post from October 2009.
• Open?: There is no explicit notice saying the data is open.
• Bulk download?: Boundary data is available for download in bulk.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-chicago

New Orleans

• Background: Mentioned in this post from May 2009.
• Open?: No re-distribution allowed.
• Bulk download?: No bulk download available.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-neworleans

New York

• Background: Nyc.gov/data was reported in New York Times earlier this month.
• Open?: Though not explicit, terms imply that data can be re-used.
• Bulk download?: Data available for download on a single page.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-nyc-gov-data

Portland

• Background: Announced on this post and reported in ReadWriteWeb in September 2009. At time of writing no open data appears to be published yet.
• Open?: Not yet published.
• Bulk download?: Not yet published.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-portland

San Francisco

• Background: Reported in Guardian in October.
• Open?: No explicit license or terms of use stating material can be reused.
• Bulk download?: Direct links to datasets given on HTML pages.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/datasf

Washington, D.C.

• Background: One of the earliest and best examples of publishing local government data online - publicised by Vivek Kundra, who went on to work on data.gov.
• Open?: Users must notify the OCTO and redistribute a disclaimer.
• Bulk download?: All datasets are linked to from main page.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/dc-octo

Canada

Calgary

• Background: A draft motion to make the City of Calgary’s data open was reported in July 2009. At time of writing no open data appears to be published yet.
• Open?: Not yet published.
• Bulk download?: Not yet published.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-calgary

Nanaimo

• Background: Reported by datalibre.ca in July 2009.
• Open?: No explicit statement that data is open. Legal disclaimer states that permission must be sought.
• Bulk download?: Datasets all linked to from main page.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-nanaimo

Toronto

• Background: VisibleGovernment.ca report in April 2009 that toronto.ca/open is announced announced at Mesh 2009. At time of writing no open data appears to be published yet. On November 2 the open data catalogue was launched at http://www.toronto.ca/open/catalogue.htm
• Open?: Bespoke terms and conditions compliant with Open Knowledge Definition
• Bulk download?: Yes. See catalogue page.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-toronto

Vancouver

• Background: Reported on ReadWriteWeb in May 2009.
• Open?: Data is explicitly open.
• Bulk download?: Data is available for download in bulk.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/vancouver-open-data-catalogue

UK

Birmingham

• Background: Digital Birmingham announce their ‘Open City’ initiative to increase access to public datasets in April 2009. They host an event in August 2009, reported here. At time of writing no open data appears to be published yet.
• Open?: Not yet published.
• Bulk download?: Not yet published.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-birmingham

Lichfield

• Background: Reported in the Guardian in October 2009.
• Open?: Datasets cannot be used for commercial purposes.
• Bulk download?: All datasets are available for download on a single page.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-lichfield

London

• Background: Initiative to open up the City of London’s data was reported in the Guardian in October 2009. At time of writing some datasets are published.
• Open?: . Currently no permission is granted to reuse data.
• Bulk download?: Datasets cannot be downloaded in bulk.
• More information:
  • http://ckan.net/package/city-london

How to open up city data

There are some excellent examples of publishing open data on cities - in particular New York, Washington and Vancouver. However not all data is explicitly open, or made available in bulk. Below is our recipe for opening up city data:

1. Use a license or legal tool to make datasets legally open! - If you are using your own custom copyright notice, license, disclaimer or terms and conditions, make sure they are compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition. You can also use existing licenses and legal tools, such as:
   • the PDDL, the ODbL, or CC0 for data
   • and CC-BY or CC-BY-SA for content
2. Make the raw data available in bulk! - Publish data in open, machine readable formats in a way which makes it easy for users to automatically download it. This could mean directly linking to all files in a single HTML page, or putting files in a single publicly accessible directory. Don’t make it difficult for users to download material by only allowing access to data via a shiny interface. Keep it simple!

Get involved!

Does your city publish open data? Do any of the details above need to be amended or added to? If you would like to get involved we encourage you to:

• add more open datasets on cities to CKAN, using the tag ‘city‘ tag, or let us know about them in the comments below…
• update the packages for the datasets listed above - just click edit on the relevant CKAN pages!
• use the Is it Open? service to request whether or not datasets in your city are legally open

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2. Opengov.se - a registry of open government data in Sweden
3. Australian government releases open data for MashupAustralia competition

• http://opendefinition.org/1.0/Svenska

If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or on info at the OKF’s domain name (okfn dot org).

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1. French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
2. Greek Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
3. Icelandic Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)

• http://opendefinition.org/1.0/Francais

If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info (at) the OKF’s domain name.

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1. Greek Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
2. Icelandic Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
3. Italian Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)

After the success of open everything Berlin last December (see documentation), the newthinking network and CC Salon Berlin teamed up to put on another event in Berlin last night:

• CC Salon Berlin and openeverything focus - Feb. 26 (CC Blog)
• openeverything focus + CC Salon (Michelle Thorne’s blogpost)

I was invited to speak - and gave an overview of the Open Knowledge Foundation, our projects, events, the background and rationale behind the Open Knowledge Definition, and a quick walkthrough of CKAN.

After me was Sebastian Moleski from Wikimedia Deutschland talking about the large donation of images from the German Federal Archives to Wikimedia Commons:

Starting on Thursday Dec 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons witnessed a massive upload of new images. We received nearly 100,000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archives. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives.

These images are licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC-BY-SA). Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archives owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license.

The donation received good press coverage (see articles in the New York Times, and Spiegel Online) and is an outstanding example of a cultural heritage institution making material available under an open license. (The other high-profile example is Flickr Commons. There’s an interesting blog post comparing the two here.)

To demonstrate CKAN in action, I created a commons-bundesarchiv entry for the collection.

Another interesting project I learned about was Valkaama - a movie where all the source material is openly licensed. (The creators have also been working on an Open Source Film Definition.)

If you’re in or around Berlin and interested in participating in similar events in the future, there’s a list of future events on the the Open Everything Berlin Mixxt Network. Also, if you want to stay in touch with people interested in all things open, see:

• open knowledge Berlin local group
• ok-berlin mailing list

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1. OKF talking at Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin
2. Announcing CC-Salon London: June 28th
3. Large collection of German texts opened up!

The Protocol gives 3 basic reasons for preferring the ‘PD’ approach in a section entitled ‘Issues in Database Licensing’. I excerpt and comment on these in turn. As will be clear from the comments below I am not really convinced by any of these points that attribution or share-alike provisions should not be included in open data licenses.

(NB: As the protocol does not discuss any of the possible attractions of allowing such provisions, for example the benefits to contributors of knowing that reusers will contribute back to the ‘commons’, I I don’t really discuss them either. However, they are clearly important to this discussion).

5.1 Category errors

Any solution based on rights will result in categorization errors: the application of obligations based on copyright in situations where it is not necessary (for example, a share-alike license on the copyrightable elements may be falsely assumed to operate on the factual contents of a database). In the reverse, a user might assume that the “Facts Are Free” status of the non-copyrightable elements extends to the entire database and inadvertently infringe.

We do not know what courts will decide in the future. But it is conceivable that in 20 years, a complex semantic query across tens of thousands of data records across the web might return a result which itself populates a new database. If intellectual property rights are involved, that query might well trigger requirements carrying a stiff penalty for failure, including such problems as a copyright infringement lawsuit.

These interpretative problems are exacerbated by differences among countries over the standards for copyright protection for databases, by the existence of sui generis database rights, and by the difficulty of interpreting contractual language.

For these reasons, solutions based on selective waiving of intellectual property rights fail to provide a high degree of legal certainty and ease of use.

I’m at a loss why these are big problems for people wanting to openly license work. Suppose there is an ‘Attribution’ only style license for a DB and I’m a user. OK so I might be uncertain as to whether I can get away with not attributing if I use only the ‘facts’ but all I need to do to have total certainty is to actually do the attribution.

Simiarly for share-alike. Ok I might be uncertain, depending on what exactly I’m reusing as to whether I’m supposed to share-alike but why don’t I just act conservative and make available (NB: share-alike only applies when you’re using the derived work in some way publicly. It doesn’t mean forcing to make everything you do available). Similarly, if I can get away as a user with not following the license (because there are no rights), well big deal!

Thus, the risk here has got to be for the original licensor who has provided a db on some conditions only to find those conditions violated (because they don’t bind). But then the protocol is just urging them to remove those conditions but a priori — which given the licensor was interested in imposing conditions might not be that attractive!

In this case, the only danger is that a licensor is bitter as they feel they have been misled — but this could be avoided with a simple warning. I also cannot understand why anyone will be any happier if they have used a community norm and then found it not being obeyed — and with community norms you wouldn’t even have the threat of actual enforcement.

Lastly, in all of this it is useful to compare data with code and content. In particular, are the uncertainties so much worse for DBs than they are for, say, a complex piece of code or content? In the code domain, for example, you might ask:

• Can I get away with not infringing the GPL if I don’t copy the code exactly but duplicate the structure?
• What happens when I do linking in code? Etc.

To my mind data does not seem more problematic and code has coped quite successfully with the issues that have arisen.

5.2 False expectations

There is also the problem of false expectations. Many users choose to apply common-use licenses such as the GPL and CC in order to declare their intent: thus, a user might choose to apply a “copyleft” term to the copyrightable elements of a database, in hopes that those elements result in additional open access database elements coming online. But a user would be able to extract the entire contents (to the extent those contents are uncopyrightable factual content) and republish those contents without observing the copyleft or share-alike terms. The data provider, based on our research, is likely to feel “tricked” by this outcome. That is not a desired result.

No it is not a desired result. However, it could simply and easily be avoided by stating that this is potential ‘risk’. After all that is what the protocol is effectively doing!

Furthermore, I wonder how many entities (particularly large corporations) would want to take the risk? After all, in a whole variety of jurisdictions there would be a pretty good case if the reextracting were substantial. My point here is that I don’t see legal uncertainty as a great reason not to license. Going back to my original point: much of the uncertainty can be avoided by both parties taking fairly minor steps. Ok there could be abuse but that happens with all open licenses in all domains.

Moreover, observe that this is really only a problem for those trying to impose ’share-alike’ provisions. But surely these are very people who aren’t going to be attracted by the ‘waive everything’ approach. Given that that the share-alike provisions do have bite in at least some jurisdictions I don’t see the value in entirely removing the share-alike provision just because they might not bite everywhere since in doing so you are clearly removing the incentive for some people to openly license their material.

(And once again, I don’t see what community norms buy you here. People have less not more reason to observe a share-alike community norm).

For this reason, the use of such licenses fails to provide a high degree of of ease of use and legal certainty.

See previous comments above.

5.3 Attribution stacking

Last, there is a problem of cascading attribution if attribution is required as part of a license approach. In a world of database integration and federation, attribution can easily cascade into a burden for scientists if a category error is made. Would a scientist need to attribute 40,000 data depositors in the event of a query across 40,000 data sets? How does this relate to the evolved norms of citation within a discipline, and does the attribution requirement indeed conflict with accepted norms in some disciplines? Indeed, failing to give attribution to all 40,000 sources could be the basis for a copyright infringement suit at worst, and at best, imposes a significant transaction cost on the scientist using the data.

Therefore, a legal obligation to give attribution violates the principle of low transaction costs.

[This now seems partially resolved in that I understand SC to no longer consider attribution-stacking as a major issue]

Again I’m not convinced here. There seem to be obvious and simple ways to provide attribution in low-cost ways (attribution via url, attribution to the project not the contributor etc etc). Wikipedia has 10s of thousands of contributors. The linux kernel has had many 1000s of contributors and yet they don’t seem to encounter massive problems.

Furthermore, the one major thing scholarly communities and others all mention in discussions about opening up data is the need for credit. Doing this via ‘community norms’ instead of via an attribution requirement in a license does not seem to make much of a difference — if “attribution stacking” is an issue with a license it will be a problem with norms too. If attribution is not going to happen then I think there are going to be serious issues asking people to make data available.

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1. Good news for open data: Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, Open Data Commons PDDL and CCZero
2. Open Data: Openness and Licensing
3. Draft of an Open Data Commons Attribution License

It is important to be clear that any IP ‘rights’ in data(bases) are not ‘rights’ in the facts those data represent but in the ‘data collection’ (or database). Here I try to explain the difference (fairly crudely) with some examples. For more on this and IP ‘rights’ in data(bases) in general see the Guide to Open Data Licensing.

1. Geodata. Suppose we have a database of longitude and latitude pairs for cities. Now, no-one can ‘own’ the fact that London is at a particular long/lat. However, it may be possible for someone to have an ‘IP’ (monopoly) right in their particular collection of such facts. In that case, if you go out and copy the long/lat from the protected database you might well infringe but if you go and calculate the long-lat yourself you won’t.

2. Chemistry. Alternatively, consider boiling points of substances. No-one can stop you going and calculating (and publishing) the boiling point of some substance but someone might be able to stop you if your data was taken direct from their database.

To summarize: “You can’t get IP rights in facts but you can (in some jurisdictions) get them in a collection of data representing those facts”

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1. Open Data: Openness and Licensing
2. Comments on the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data
3. Some facts about UK postcodes

Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share.

However, open data is crucial to progress on these more fundamental items. It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse. We therefore want people to have incentives to make their data open and for open data to be easily usable and reusable — i.e. for open data to form a ‘commons’.

A good definition of openness acts as a standard that ensures different open datasets are ‘interoperable’ and therefore do form a commons. Licensing is important because it reduces uncertainty. Without a license you don’t know where you, as a user, stand: when are you allowed to use this data? Are you allowed to give to others? To distribute your own changes, etc?

Together, a definition of openness, plus a set of conformant licenses deliver clarity and simplicity. Not only is interoperability ensured but people can know at a glance, and without having to go through a whole lot of legalese, what they are free to do. (For more see this article and this post).

Thus, licensing and definitions are important even though they are only a small part of the overall picture. If we get them wrong they will keep on getting in the way of everything else. If we get them right we can stop worrying about them and focus our full energies on other things.

Background

Over the last couple of years there has been substantial discussion about the licensing (or not) of (open) data and what ‘open’ should mean. In this debate there two distinct, but related, strands:

1. Some people have argued that licensing is inappropriate (or unnecessary) for data.
2. Disagreement about what ‘open’ should mean. Specifically: does openness allow for attribution and share-alike ‘requirements’ or should ‘open’ data mean ‘public domain’ data?

These points are related because arguments for the inappropriateness of licensing data usually go along the lines: data equates to facts over which no monopoly IP rights can or should be granted; as such all data is automatically in the public domain and hence there is nothing to license (and worse ‘licensing’ amounts to an attempt to ‘enclose’ the public domain).

However, even those who think that open data can/should only be public domain data still agree that it is reasonable and/or necessary to have some set of community ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ governing usage of data. Therefore, the question of what requirements should be allowed for ‘open’ data is a common one, whatever one’s stance on the PD question.

Of course, even with agreement on requirements, there is still the question of whether these should be ‘enforced’ through a license or via community norms. To summarize, the three main questions are:

Qu 1. Is it important to license?

Qu 2: What ‘restrictive’ requirements are compatible with openness? In particular does ‘open’ equate to PD only or are attribution and share-alike ‘requirements’ permitted?

Qu 3: Community norms or licenses? Should ‘community norms’ or license terms be used in order to encode requirements such as attribution and share-alike?

Below I look at each of these in turn, laying out, as I see it, the current consensus and expressing my own view.

Question 1: Is it Important to License?

The simple answer here is yes. Whether one likes it or not there are a whole bunch of jurisdictions where there are IP rights in data(bases). Note that this does not imply any monopoly rights in any facts that data represents.

Thus, even if you just want your data to be in the ‘public domain’, you need to apply a license — or something very closely resembling a license. (A suitable example is the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License).

Question 2: What Should Openness Allow?

Despite the sometimes heated discussion, there is, in fact, broad agreement: openness means freedom to use and reuse data in any way you wish. The only debate is over what, if any, conditions can be imposed when allowing use and reuse. In particular, following the example of the software and content domains, the following two items have been proposed as permissible exceptions to the basic rule of ‘allow everything’:

1. Requirement of attribution (in a non-burdensome manner)
2. Requirement to share-alike (a reuser or share-alike material must, when making publicly available their own material, make it openly available under a similar share-alike license)

Attribution

Everyone agrees that requiring attribution is OK. Furthermore, it also now generally accepted that having this requirement in a license is not be a problem.

(In the original Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data attribution was alleged to be problematic due to a potential for ‘attribution stacking’. However, these concerns appear to have been allayed. To my mind, it was never clear why data needed to be different: code and content both have plenty of examples of projects with many contributors, much reuse and an attribution requirement).

Share-Alike

Share-alike provisions are more controversial. It has been argued that share-alike conditions are problematic because of the potential for incompatibility between two share-alike licenses (or community norms). At the same time share-alike may provide an important incentive for individuals and communities to make their data openly available since it provides some assurance that this data will remain open. Thus, any evaluation comes down to the balance between:

1. The costs, if any, of allowing share-alike in terms of e.g. complexity and compatibility.

2. The benefits, if any, that share-alike provides by encouraging the creation of open data in the first place and in ensuring subsequent ’sharing back’ by those who build upon that data.

In my view the benefits are substantial while the costs are not. Incompatibility can largely be avoided by only ‘approving’ share-alike licenses that are compatible. At the same time, share-alike enshrines a principle that is important to many communities in the code and content spheres and same seems true of data (consider e.g. Open Street Map).

(Aside: it is important to emphasize that permitting share-alike does not mean it is must be used. In fact, a particular community could recommend against using share-alike as, for example, the Python community does for code hoping to make it into its standard library.)

Question 3: Licenses versus Community Norms

Even if a basic license is used it can be argued that any ‘requirements’ for attribution or share-alike should not be in a license but in ‘community norms’. So which is best?

In my view, when making available data, licenses are much better than community norms. Why?

1. A license is always needed even if you are taking a PD approach. So ‘norms’ don’t obviate the need to license.
2. A license is able to encode ‘norms’ both formally and informally (for example, in a preamble — cf. the GPL).
3. A license is likely to elicit at least as much, and almost certainly more, conformity with its provisions than community norms. This is especially true outside of the community. The future is likely to see a much more mixed data landscape whether in science or elsewhere with many ‘non-community’ (non-academic) business and among ordinary citizens. (Note also that for these groups the simplicity and formality of a license makes it superior to ‘norms’ in almost every respect — transparency, certainty etc.
   • If there are concerns that, in some jurisdictions, the absence of ‘data’ rights make e.g. share-alike provisions unenforceable nothing is lost by using a license: the license de facto reverts to the status of a community norm and any concerns regarding “false expectations” can easily be dealt with by a simple warning.

Flexibility: some have argued that ‘norms’ are more ‘flexible’ than licenses. I’m not clear what this really means:

• Flexible = not enforceable. Perhaps true but I am unclear why this is an advantage (even to a user it is easy to comply with the open license)
• Flexible = leeway around the edges. For example I won’t get in trouble if I don’t attribute quite right. But this is true of licenses too: it is very unlikely anyone gets sued for a minor error in attribution and even with share-alike no court is likely to award damages for a mistake made in good faith — especially if it can be easily corrected.
• Flexible = fuzzy. Fuzziness does not seem an attractive property when sharing data — both sharer and sharee want clarity.
• Flexible = easily changed. Allowing major changes is a serious problem both for licensors and licensees (certainty and clarity would disappear). For minor changes licenses are just as good.

Thus, in every respect I can think of, licenses are superior to community norms when making available open data.

Conclusion

Summarizing the the conclusions from the above discussion we have:

Qu 0: Does this matter?

Yes. A good definition of openness and the use of some form of licensing is crucial to a healthy future for the open data community (and that will include pretty much everyone …).

Qu 1: Is it important to license?

Ans: A ‘license’ is always necessary — even if you advocate a PD-only approach. There is too much variation (and uncertainty) about what the IP situation is across the world to just go with the default. All providers of data should apply some kind of license or PD dedication.

Qu 2: What ‘restrictive’ requirements are compatible with openness? In particular does ‘open’ equate to PD only or are attribution and share-alike ‘requirements’ permitted?

Ans: Both attribution and share-alike should be permitted. Attribution is widely agreed to be acceptable. The second, ’share-alike’ is more controversial, but in my view should be allowed: there is no reason to break with the precedent set in code and content domains and its benefits seem substantial while costs are minimal if licenses are correctly managed.

Qu 3: Community norms or licenses?

Ans: Use licenses when making available data. Licenses provide all the benefits of community norms in terms of explicitly encoding the preferences of a community. At the same time they deliver greater clarity and transparency, and, in many jurisdictions, provides a legal enforceability which norms do not with regard to requirements of attribution or share-alike.

Colophon

This essay comes out of ongoing discussions over the last few years with a large assortment of communities and individuals. The primary motivation for sitting down and pulling the threads together came out of reading Michael Nielsen’s post on The role of open licensing in open science (+ thread) and recent emails with John Wilbanks of Science Commons on the Open Definition coord list.

Related work and earlier discussion on this matter include:

• The Open Definition
• The Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data
• The Guide to Open Data Licensing
• Open Data Discussion on SPARC Open Data List (2006)
• Copyright Not Applicable to Geodata Post (2007) (+ associated threads)
• The Open Data Commons
• CCZero license

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Related posts:

1. Comments on the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data
2. Draft of an Open Data Commons Attribution License
3. Open licensing for philanthropic foundations - “Why not?”

The interview includes discussion about the distinction between price and value, about the Open Knowledge Definition, about CKAN, about decentralised approaches to working with large quantities of data, about packaging for knowledge and about ‘Shiny Front End Syndrome’. It ends with 3 suggestions for people publishing collections of content or data.

Here’s an excerpt:

Well, one day soon we’re going to have a lots of material that is open and what’s really exciting about open stuff is that it can easily be shared and recombined. That means we can break very complicated problems down into small bits, which people can manage. But then, we can put it back together again. So, let’s say you were interested in U.S. unemployment, a hot topic, and you’re interested in understanding how it changes. Maybe there’s a data site out there just on unemployment itself. But maybe there’s another one on house repossessions or the housing market, and then, there’s another one on manufacturing. There are a whole bunch of different data sites.

Now, maybe one person could just maintain them all but that might become too big a job. You may need expertise in the housing market to maintain the housing data site, but you really want to bring these together often when you want to do analysis, or compute things, or make pretty pictures, or whatever it is you want to do. This is very similar to building a large building, let’s say, or developing an operating system plus all the applications to use. Maybe one person could build them all and make sure they all work together but that would be quite a big task. Even the world’s greatest monopolist struggles to do this effectively.

So, the typical way we go about doing this is by exploiting divide and conquer. But when you divide stuff up, there was this question about how you bring it back together. So then, we say we’re moving toward a world where you can start getting lots of these data sets and then start putting them out there in the world. They can just start taking this unemployment data or this housing data. But, how do you find that and how do you get a hold of it? So often in software, there’s been this tradition of building some kind of registry where you can find things, and then you start to impose some structure on that material, you start packaging. So rather than just saying: here’s my website, here’s my Wiki, look, there’s lots of data on it, you are going to start packaging that data in a slightly more structured form.

The point of CKAN is to start saying, look, there’s a better way than just having our stuff in wikis or in some random form on a website. We can start registering this material, and packaging it up a bit. That way other people, when they want them, can come and get hold of them easily and wheel of reuse can start to turn.

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Related posts:

1. Interview with Science Commons for their Voices from the Future of Science
2. Interview with Jordan Hatcher on legal tools for open data
3. What Obama can do to promote openness

If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info (at) the OKF’s domain name.

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Related posts:

1. Greek Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
2. Italian Translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)
3. French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD)