[Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Gavin Treadgold]

On 2009-12-07, at 14:01 , Bruce Bannerman wrote:
> Sorry, I'm missing the point. What is it that you don't like about CC?

I was going to jump in earlier, and now seems a good time.

I believe the point that Brent is trying to make - is that when it comes to data governance, licensing and copyright is just a small aspect of what is required when releasing government data. As Brent has pointed out, metadata is also as important, as is the provenance.

It is great to see Australasian government agencies adopting CC-BY for copyright and licensing, but I (and I assume Brent) also recognise that there are plenty of other aspects related to the release of government data, and whilst we should be congratulating NZ and Australian agencies for releasing data under permissive licenses, issues such as provenance, metadata, and indeed how attribution of data in complex mashups should be handled. 

On the attribution angle - we've had plenty of discussions on the NZ Open GIS list about how attribution should be handled for data going into OSM - is a single reference in the OSM wiki OK? Or should we be tagging every node and derived line with a source tag that attributes the source? Both of these would attribute the data correctly, but one approach is likely to be far more robust at tracking both the provenance of the data and correctly attributing the original source.

CC does not provide any guidance on best practice for how the attribution should occur, it just says that it must be attributed. That is fine for creative works, but is a lot harder to manage when you have factual data such as roads, that anyone, including someone like myself can easily edit and correct errors in the originally released government data. Especially if you have to manage the provence down to the node and connecting line level that geospatial types sometimes expect.

Cheers Gav