FAIR vocabularies

[Francoise Genova]

Sorry, the semantics list was skipped when I replied

Le 02/12/2020 à 12:01, Francoise Genova a écrit :
> Dear Markus,
>
> Many thanks for your prompt answer. I had missed the fact that there 
> is a licence on the IVOA vocabularies.
>
> The licensing question was evident, but to find whether there are 
> other issues one would need to make a detailed assessment. My 
> understanding is that the criteria to establish that a vocabulary is 
> FAIR are not really agreed upon at this time, so I guess that the RFC 
> should go on with its own schedule. If there are people interested in 
> discussing the rules which are being discussed in different venues, 
> maybe we can have a small sub-group to have a look together?
>
> Cheers
>
> Francoise
>
> Le 02/12/2020 à 11:47, Markus Demleitner a écrit :
>> Dear Françoise,
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 08:57:03AM +0100, Francoise Genova wrote:
>>> I have the feeling that our vocabularies are not so bad in terms of
>>> community-driven governance. Once again there is an issue with 
>>> licence. I
>>> just asked the question and the answer is that something which is 
>>> openly
>>> available on the web cannot be reused if it does not have a licence 
>>> (I have
>>> to admit that I was expecting this answer because I got the same 
>>> about data
>>> when I asked in in other contexts). A hot debate followed my 
>>> question in the
>>> chat about the type of licence and as usual nothing is simple in the 
>>> licence
>>> domain. When we discussed licences for data the decision of licences 
>>> was
>>> clearly on the data provider side. For vocabularies maintained by 
>>> the IVOA
>>> it should be in the hands of the Exec but there is a need to do a
>>> preliminary assessment before any decision.
>> With vocabularies governed by Vocabularies in the VO 2, one use case
>> is offline use, and hence we want the vocabularies to be
>> distributable with software.  To ensure that, we could use a software
>> licence, but then that only marginally makes sense with semantic
>> resources.  On the CC side, everything but CC-0 is incompatible with
>> software licences and would thus break the use case, and hence we
>> settled for CC-0 globally a while ago.
>>
>> https://www.ivoa.net/rdf/ and the individual renderings (at the foot
>> of the HTML rendering, in dc:license triples for the RDF renderings;
>> desise doesn't include the declaration yet) of the vocabularies say
>> as much.
>>
>> There is an exception for the UAT, which (IMHO regrettably) has
>> chosen CC-BY-SA.  That's not something we can fix, and so we can only
>> declare that and live with the consequences.
>>
>>
>> By the way, CC-0 isn't a licence, as it does not contain claims of
>> copyright[1] and hence there can be no licensor.  So, the right way
>> to state what we do is: "The IVOA distribute their own vocabularies
>> under CC-0".
>>
>>> There are likely other issues than licences in our practices with 
>>> respect to
>>> what emerges in the discussion on the definition of FAIRess for
>>> vocabularies.
>> Please do bring them up here as they emerge.  As we'd like to bring
>> the Vocabularies 2 specification to RFC soon: Is there a schedule for
>> these discussions?
>>
>>           -- Markus
>>
>> [1] Which, in collaborative resources that vocabularies often are, is
>> another big advantage, as there are no problems of copyright
>> transfer or its substitutes in jurisdictions that don't allow it.
>>
>