Open Data Commons

Open Data Commons are happy to announce the first draft of an attribution license for data/databases:

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/

A commentable version of the text is available here:

http://www.co-ment.net/text/2091/

Feedback is actively sought and we would be grateful for any assistance in circulating this announcement to relevant communities and networks.

The license is heavily based on the Open Database License (ODbL), though [...]

Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web

Open Data Commons co-founder and co-author of the PDDL and ODbL, Jordan Hatcher, will be speaking at the International Semantic Web Conference in Washington DC on the 25th of October on open data, including on the Open Data Commons set of licenses.

OKF is also hosting a [...]

We are delighted to announce the release of v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL):

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

The Open Database License (ODbL) is an open license for data and databases which includes explicit attribution and share-alike requirements.

This license, the first of its kind, is a major step forward for open data. There are currently very few licenses available [...]

The Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 “Release Candidate 2″ is now available at:

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

As expected there haven’t been many changes from the first Release Candidate. The two main alterations are:

Removal of section 4.7 related to reverse engineering. This may be reintroduced in later versions but has been left out here in order to remove any possible [...]

We’ve started work on an ultra simple guide to assist people who want to make their data open:

http://www.opendatacommons.org/guide/

We’ve been asked a lot recently for a simple HOWTO and this guide is one effort to address this.

This is a first draft and we’d really like to hear any feedback people have.

The Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 “Release Candidate” is now available at:

http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/

This updated version of the license incorporates a whole set of changes arising out of the earlier comments period and the main changes are summarized below.

As the naming suggests, we believe this text is now very close to a “production-ready” 1.0 license. To allow [...]

Thinh Nguyen, Counsel for Science Commons, has posted a piece on free and open data to the Science Commons site. In it, he references our work on the Public Domain Dedication and Licence.

Freedom to Research: Keeping Scientific Data Open, Accessible, and Interoperable [PDF]

Science Commons blog post announcement: Nguyen on keeping data open and free.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking on open data, law, and licensing at State of the Map on 12-13 July in Limerick, Ireland. State of the Map is the annual conference for Open Street Map.

Registration is now open.

Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons project

Location: Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS. This event is open to the public. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to: events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Perhaps surprisingly for some, data and databases are not a ‘rights free’ area where no [...]

FYI, Richard Poynder’s interview with John Wilbanks, VP of Science Commons, is available and discusses open data.