As noted on this blog back in January, The Big Data Europe project puts data handling technologies in everyone’s hands, whether that data is open or not. As a result, we need to be able to recognise that the use of a particular dataset or data stream may require certain obligations to be fulfilled, that permission to use it may be needed, and so on. Where Creative Commons licences are sufficient, they should be used. They are simple, well understood and widely recognised; no question. But step into the commercial world and of course things can look very different and BDE needs to be able to support all manner of use cases.
That’s why a small portion of the project’s resources is being used to support the W3C‘s Permissions & Obligations Expression Working Group. This will take existing work on ODRL as its starting point, together with closely related work like IPTC’s RightsML.
If you are from a W3C Member organisation, you are, of course, welcome to join the working group that was formally approved by the Director on 26 February following a vote of the W3C Advisory Council. If not, note that all W3C standards are developed in public (mostly on GitHub) and that feedback is welcome at any time, especially when new drafts of the working group’s documents are formally published. All the relevant links and information is on the P&OE WG‘s home page of course.
