[doap-interest] questions about license information

[Antoine]

Hi,

I have questions about the way DOAP currently represents license
information.

First, there is a handful of licenses proposed in
http://usefulinc.com/doap/licenses/. These licenses have their URI on
the usefulinc.com Web site, and they mention the original URI merely as
"seeAlso", which means - if I'm not mistaken - that it's not considered
as an identifier by itself. This means that those URIs must be
maintained on the usefulinc.com website. I suppose it's only a temporary
measure, until the real maintainers of those licenses provide their own
RDF for them?

Second, these pre-crafted RDF descriptions of licenses don't give any
useful information. It uses the RDF schema created by Creative Commons,
but does not exploit any useful part of its vocabulary. Once again, is
it deliberate or just in wait for something better? Has some thought
been given to a precise vocabulary for free/open source licenses, or is
there any project aiming at this?


For the context of my questions: we are willing to find a way to add
licensing metadata to works of art (and other types of contents)
licensed under the Free Art License. The Free Art License is one of the
first free copyleft licenses for more than software (see:
http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/).
We have considered using the CC vocabulary, but don't know whether that
would be satisfactory:
  - it is specifically targetted at CC licenses - the vocabulary
reflects that
  - it does not address some of the points that would be useful (for
example, statement of compatibility with various other well-known
licenses: this would enable queries like "I want an RDF processing
library that can be incorporated into a piece of GPL software")
  - since it's meant for and controlled by CC, I suppose it would be
difficult to make it evolve into something more generic and more useful
to the free software/contents communities

Do some people think it would be a good idea to have a specific
vocabulary to describe, in precise and non-ambiguous terms, free/open
source licenses?

Thanks in advance

Antoine.