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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:05:07 +0200
From: Dan Brickley <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: license terms for DC translation data? (creative commons?)

Hi folks

I'm currently working on an EU project on the topic of medical content
labelling (health website classification etc., for details see
http://www.medieq.org/node/21). Our data uses some pieces of Dublin
Core, and one of our requirements is that the UI and classification is
translated into each of 7 languages (Spanish, Catalan, German, English,
Greek, Czech, and Finnish).

First of all, I'd just like to say "thanks!" to everyone in the
dc-international community who has worked on translating the DCMI term
documentation. It seems that there is already some version of a
translation for each of these languages. Great work :)

So I'm trying to find out how exactly we can use and build upon this
work. The DC site points to Web pages and document-level translations.
And there's also the registry software, see

    http://dublincore.org/dcregistry/pageDisplayServlet?page=source.xsl

...whose publically available distribution includes a snapshot copy of
schema-level translations. The latter is more what we're looking for,
since we want to be able to process the translated labels in our own
software (eg. run queries like, "find me the catalan label for dc:title").

Actually we can do that already! If I load up the file from
registry/RDF/schemas/dces_caES in the registry software, and do this
SPARQL(*) RDF query:

     PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
     PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
     SELECT ?label
     WHERE {
       dc:title rdfs:label ?label .
       FILTER ( lang(?label) =  "ca-es") .
     }

...I get just what I want. Here is another one that gives me a table of
labels and comments for all terms described in Catalan:

     PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
     SELECT DISTINCT ?term ?label ?comment ?type
     WHERE {
       ?term rdfs:label ?label .
       ?term rdfs:comment ?comment .
       ?term a ?type .
       FILTER ( lang(?label) =  "ca-es") .
     }


So there are a few practicalities.

I understand this collection of schema data is a frozen snapshot, and
not an official release of the DCMI. It is bundled within some
opensource software from DCMI whose license terms are, according to
http://dublincore.org/dcregistry/pageDisplayServlet?page=source.xsl
documented in http://dublincore.org/dcpl/

  - should I consider the DCPL (Dublin Core Public License Version 1.0)
as applying to the schema data too?

  - would a Creative Commons license be more appropriate now? CC has a
lot of public awareness, http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

  - may I republish (with suitable human + machine-oriented status
info?) copies of those schemas at a public URI, to make it easier to run
queries against the datasets? does DCMI have any plans to do this centrally?

  - are any of the translations available from source in RDF/XML format,
or is the registry software effort the way to get a machine-readable
version?

Thanks for any thoughts,

Dan

(*) SPARQL is a standard under development at W3C for querying data that
is expressed in RDF.


ps. feel free to pass this onto dc-registry. i'm not on that list...
pps. ideally, the data licensing metadata would be expressed within the
schemas themselves, so that I could run queries instead of writing
emails, when trying to find out how I can use the data.