Open Source Knowledge Management: What Comes After Access?

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Jonathan Rees of Science Commons discussed the open source knowledge management system that Science Commons is developing. He discussed the importance of interfacing different stores of data and knowledge, and elucidated how Science Commons is making progress on these issues. In the process Jonathan gave six layers of what comprises an interface: permission, access, container, syntax, vocabulary, and semantics.

The focus of this project is on data integration, and the importance of data integration is reducing the huge transactions costs of using different data stores which have been assembled for different purposes. Data integration does happen, but at huge expense of effort; it is hard, complex, and fragile;”glue” is necessary at all levels, and the process is manual and error-prone.

By developing and testing the whole interface stack for scientific data, the data integration problem becomes vastly easier to understand, browse, search, consult, transform, analyze, visualize, model, annotate, and organize data.

Jonathan closed with a call to action is to “choose, promote, and nourish sharing solutions at every level in the stack”.

Copyright Registries 2.0

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Mario Pena of Safe Creative, Joe Benso of Registered Commons, and Mike Linksvayer of CC gave a talk on “Copyright Registries 2.0″ as a continuation of the registration conversation we had at our first tech summit in June.

Mario began with a summary of registries and how they should work: they must provide pointers to works, and they must facilitate the sharing of relevant information. He pointed to RDFa and ccREL as examples of technologies in this sphere promoting interoperability. He also mentioned the Open Standards for Copyright Registry Interop as an example of the work being done to help foster online registries interoperability and standardization.

Next, Joe discussed what he sees as necessary for registries moving forward. The big point he made was that Registered Commons feels a registry authority is a necessary condition for registries to be successfully implemented. He started with a brief history of Registered Commons and named the features they provide, including use of the CC API, timestamping of works, and physical identity verification. He finished with the need for an authority: to allocate namespaces, appoint registries based on criteria, identify entities to be certified, etc.

liblicense 0.8 (important) fixes RDF predicate error

asheesh, July 30th, 2008

Brown paper bag release: liblicense claims that the RDF predicate for a file’s license is http://creativecommons.org/ns#License rather than http://creativecommons.org/ns#license. Only the latter is correct.

Any code compiled with liblicense between 0.6 and 0.7.1 (inclusive) contains this mistake.

This time I have audited the library for other insanities like the one fixed here, and there are none. Great thanks to Nathan Yergler for spotting this. I took this chance to change ll_write() and ll_read() to *NOT* take NULL as a valid predicate; this makes the implementation simpler (and more correct).

Sadly, I have bumped the API and ABI numbers accordingly. It’s available in SourceForge at http://sf.net/projects/cctools, and will be uploaded to Debian and Fedora shortly (and will follow from Debian to Ubuntu).

I’m going to head to Argentina for a vacation and Debconf shortly, so there’ll be no activity from on liblicense for a few weeks. I would love help with liblicense in the form of further unit tests. Let’s squash those bugs by just demonstrating all the cases the license should work in.

RDFa for Semantic MediaWiki [GSoC 2008]

David McCabe, July 1st, 2008

Hello, world!

My name is David McCabe, and this summer I am adding RDFa support to Semantic MediaWiki, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2008. I am an undergraduate in Mathematics at Portland State University. For the Google Summer of Code 2006, I wrote Liquid Threads, a MediaWiki extension that replaces talk pages with a threaded discussion system.

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is the software used for the CC wiki and many other wikis. SMW allows authors to mark up wiki pages so that their contents and relationships are machine-readable. SMW already publishes this machine-readable data in RDF/XML format.

You can read about RDFA on the CC Wiki. There is also a Google Tech Talk on RDFa.

RFC 4946

Mike Linksvayer, July 19th, 2007

James Snell writes that the Atom License Extension is now Experimental RFC 4946.

Many thanks to James Snell for at least two years of work on this.

What is needed to move further along the standards track? More implementations.

There’s a page on the CC wiki about licensing and syndication standards.

Atom License Extension

Mike Linksvayer, May 4th, 2007

Thanks to the work of James Snell the Atom License Extension has been approved for publishing as an Experimental RFC.

Read about CC license support in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0 on our wiki page about syndication.