Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin.
COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. My slides are available at:
Other talks directly related to open knowledge included:
- Xavier Serra (Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University) – on automated metadata production for sound, and the freesound project (content is currently licensed under CC Sampling Plus, but there are plans to introduce other licensing options)
- Simone Brunozzi – on BeeSeek, a peer to peer open-source search engine
- S̩verine Dusollier (FUNDP РCentre de recherche informatique et droit) Рon setting up a positive legal definition and regime for the public domain
Seeing as though there look to be many areas of common interest between the OKF and the COMMUNIA network, I suggested in my talk and thoughout the day that:
- We should work together to create a set of ‘public domain calculators’ – or algorithms that can help to determine whether or not a given work is out of copyright in a given jurisdiction (such as we’ve been working on with Public Domain Works and the Open Library);
- We should work together to pool open metadata – whether this be bibliographic metadata, or metadata for databases or large collections of knowledge resources (such as are listed in CKAN).
This is a great opportunity to strengthen the community of individuals and organisations with an interest in open knowledge and the public domain across Europe. I look forward to seeing the launch of the Working Groups!
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
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