Semantic Labels for Creative Commons Licences
After reading an article today about the recent formation of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach programme (which I’m a member of), it occurred to me that we (Segala) should get on with creating Content Labels for uses cases that we recognise as worth while.
We’re going to encourage industry to come up with new codes of conduct through http://contentlabel.org but we already know of uses cases that can be put together quickly.
So, my first thought after reading the article was to create a Content Label specifically for creative commons licences . For background information, creative commons
provides free tools that lets authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.
A lot of bloggers tend to have a CC licence and with the growing number of blogs and increased adoption of open source projects, CC licences are likely to grow significantly in the near future.
Placing a visual badge is the most widely used method for displaying your 
licence terms on your Web site. It is also possible to include some metadata based on the Semantic method RDF. The latter means your visual badge becomes machine-detectable and not just visible to humans.
By installing a Firefox extension you can see relevant license characteristic icons being added to the status bar when you hit a site with the metadata. It also adds a button to the toolbar which allows you to explore associated metadata. However, it looks to me, like you need to be on a site before you get the icons in the status bar. For this reason, it has limited benefit.
So, my idea might fall at the first hurdle given the support the CC has for RDF already. However, I think it’s possible that Content Labels could be a way to repackage the metadata as a useful implementation that end users can benefit from.
Content Labels are files that contain the same type of Semantic data, only they’re used for different purposes. Content Labels are used by Web site
owners who wish to demonstrate their conformance to standards such as Web accessibility and codes of conduct such as ICRA descriptors to help protect children from inappropriate content.
The fact that Content Labels can be detected and used by search engines and browsers to change the ranking order of search results is just one of the compelling arguments to use them.
So, using our Firefox extension (as a proof of concept), you could filter search results based on labels for creative commons. In other words, as a user, I could set my preferences to only display sites with a creative commons licence. This would filter out Webs sites that don’t contain a CC Content Label.
For me, it’s much more compelling if the metadata is used at the search stage to help users make informed decisions about Web sites before entering them.
4 Responses to “Semantic Labels for Creative Commons Licences”
Leave a Reply
Paul
an interesting idea. I’m a long-time fan of Creative Commons, and of mozCC. In a previous life, I funded some work to look at the applicability of CC licences to (UK) public sector content, and Larry Lessig was an early contributor to the podcast series for which I spoke with you last year.
The CC-powered search engines offered by the likes of Yahoo! and Creative Commons themselves presumably go some way toward meeting your goal, but I guess they do it by crawling all the pages, and then scanning them for the embedded RDF. Your solution allows the content owner to proactively declare their licensing to the world; without the world having to turn up at their door and either look for a CC logo, install mozCC, or View Source to manually parse the RDF.
I can see use cases in which it would be useful to pre-filter results on the basis of something like a CC licence. Indeed, I had a conversation very like that, not so long ago…
Is there a technological middle ground, between the top-down crawl and the bottom-up active assertion?
Well put Paul, I need people like you to better articulate what’s in my head
Personally I believe our method is the easiest to adopt for the reasons given. I’d like to emphasise that if a label for CC was just one of many labels, it would add to the weight of labels in general.
I think the middle ground is to support both? Or at least, create the labels and see which sees better adoption. What do you think? You clearly have more experience with CC than I do.
I wouldn’t see labels in this area as a duplication of effort. I would see it as a means of repackaging the great work that has already been done.
It might be worth a conversation with someone like Ben Adida… ?
Any chance you could ask Ben to stop by with his comments? I know this post is being read by some other qualified people who would like to contribute when they see fit. Otherwise I’m very happy to talk offline. Either way the pleasure will be all mine