[Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

Hi Brianna,

I have some concerns about the adoption of CC licences for data, which are shared by others, & have been discussed on the net in various places...

CC was designed as a content licence, not a data licence and IMHO has two main shortcomings as a data licence (and open database licences have yet further idiosyncracies).

Firstly, CC3-BY allows the data to be released with whatever attribution requirements the data provider cares to add. Not a problem for content generally, but the point in releasing data is to allow it to be used & re-used with other data & derivative data. Tracking & implementing some attribution requirements in this situation can lead to situations where the required attribution is impossible, difficult or cumbersome for users. If CC3 is to be used for data, then a common & facilitative standard government attribution requirement should be incorporated instead of the usual unrestricted one, which lets everyone create their own.

Secondly, any information on data provenance (metadata) is not required. To be useful, all such datasets should have some basic metadata available. For example, data precision, date of release, date of expiry (or when it is due to be superceded), etc. A road centreline dataset, or census information, or land use data is of very restricted use unless this information is available to provide users with enough information to know if the dataset is unsuitable for the intended purpose for any reason. Without this information datasets can easily be misused, misinterpreted & provide misleading results. If I have two census datasets, but don't know what year each was taken.... etc. 

Several licences for freely available (open) data are available & more are being developed, much like the variety of licences for FOSS software (GPL. LGPL, BSD, Apache, MIT, etc...)

A few examples of Open Data licences & sources of information: 

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
https://biblios.net/pddl
http://www.opencontentlawyer.com/open-data/open-database-licence/
http://opendefinition.org/guide/data


One example that may be of interest, the organisation I work for, NIWA in NZ (comments are my opinion, not necessarily NIWA's :-), used to sell access to our national climate database. About 18 months ago we made this freely available. We went from around 200 paying users to currently about 10,000. 

It has implications for the organisation, and some users now have expectations of availability, so any downtime (even for a free service) can occasionally result in quite abusive demands, but I believe the freeing up of these data has been a very positive exercise overall, despite the inevitable leeches of such services :-)


Cheers,

  Brent Wood

--- On Mon, 12/7/09, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY
> To: "OSGeo Aust-NZ" <Aust-NZ at lists.osgeo.org>
> Date: Monday, December 7, 2009, 1:28 AM
> Hi,
> 
> Apologies if this was discussed before, but I was wondering
> if the
> Geoscience Australia move to the CC-BY license had come to
> the
> collective attention?
> http://www.ga.gov.au/about-us/news-media/latest-news/index.jsp#commons
> 
> As a geospatial onlooker rather than in-the-thick-of-it
> member I would
> be interested to hear from the folks here what they think
> this is
> likely to mean, or how it may play out, eg more stuff
> available
> directly online, less sales?
> 
> cheers
> Brianna
> (Wikimedia Australia)
> 
> -- 
> They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right
> moment:
> http://modernthings.org/
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