The use of Creative Commons licenses for Government resources (eg documents) is usually a good direction to take. However, when you do this you must be fully aware of the terms and condition clauses that comes with each CC license, otherwise there is a serious risk that the end user will not be granted the rights that they would expect.

All CC licenses include the Entire Agreement clause. See an example in Section 12 of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence as shown here:

12. Entire Agreement
This Licence constitutes the entire agreement between the parties. To the full extent permitted by law, there are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This Licence may not be modified without the written agreement of the Licensor and You.

What this basically means is that the CC Licenses is an “all or nothing” license - that is - the CC License and only the CC license applies to the Work (ie the document). No other terms and conditions can be used along with the CC license. This is appropriate as the model is that there is one license for the Work and the end user only needs to refer to the one place for all the terms and conditions.

However, there have been a number of cases where this requirement has been ignored for some Government resources. I assume that the proponents have simply not understood Clause 12 and/or have not been made aware of this restriction.
Here are two recent examples of high profile documents that assign CC licensees with additional terms and conditions.

The BUDGET STRATEGY AND OUTLOOK 2011-12 (BUDGET PAPER NO. 1) (PDF) has the following text on the second page:

Creative Commons licence
With the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms (see below); the Budget logo; Statement 1: Budget Overview; Statement 2: Economic Outlook; Statement 3: Fiscal Strategy and Outlook; Statement 4: Opportunities and Challenges of an Economy in Transition, Statement 7: Asset and Liability Management, all material in this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia Licence.

This is quite a significant list of exclusions from the document (major sections of the report) and clearly in breech of Clause 12.

The National Digital Economy Strategy 2011 #au20 (PDF) has the following text on the second page:

Unless otherwise noted in the ‘Materials Excluded and Rights Reserved’ list below, the text in the DBCDE National Digital Economy Strategy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.
Materials Excluded and Rights Reserved
All rights in the materials listed below are reserved:

• Commonwealth Coat of Arms and Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy logo

• all tables and images (including any text included, or embodied, in the table or image)

• material appearing in quotes

• material that is attributed to a source other than the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

On Tuesday 11th of January 2011 we hear from our neighbours that parts of Yeronga are being evacuated due to expected flooding of the Brisbane River. It had been raining non-stop for weeks and weeks. We decided to start to move all the valuable stuff from the ground floor to the first floor and perhaps evacuate ourselves.

We managed to move most stuff upstairs...even the Piano movers made it in time - before the roads were to cut off to everyone. (That saved the insurance company $5K alone!)

We came back on Wednesday morning to grab a few more things from the house. Driving back to the house, we turned down a road that we have done for the past 15 years - only this time - it is completely full of water and so were all the houses around it. This is when it really hits you - this is a real flood.

We make it to our house (via a back road) and when we get there we see the water has made it up to the steps of the ground floor deck. This is now scary and you want to leave quickly. We grab a few more things from the house and make a run for it. We get back to our friends place and the wife wants more stuff retrieved from the house. We venture back - about an hour has passed now - and we now see the water about 30cm up into the ground floor. It’s all over now.

We spend the next nights at friends homes watching the TV and praying for the best outcome. When they keep saying that the flood will break the 1974 flood level - then we know we have lost everything as 1974 was just at our first floor level.

Thursday comes and we wait. I get a call from my neighbour in the afternoon to come on back and see the damage. The water had drained significantly over the past 12 hours and the roads were just passable (even in my little Mazda).

Arriving at the house, we find the water had reached about 1.25m inside the ground floor and over 2.2m outside in the yard. The mess and smell was unbelievable.

We spend the next few days cleaning and cleaning and removing rubbish. The atmosphere in the streets is something never experienced. People everywhere lending a hand....fresh water...and BBQ across the park...some guys with 40 pizzas in their boot handing them out to anyone...

In the end, we were one of the lucky ones. Further down our street and behind us was complete devastation. Both floors of many homes inundated. The streets of Fairfield are like a war zone. Mud everywhere. Army people everywhere. Still today, some of these streets are completely abandoned.

In the end, many questions will be asked. The biggest of course was of if this could have been avoided. The mythical Wivenhoe Dam was supposed to stop us from these floods (built after the big 1974 flood). But in the ensuing decades, the Dam went from Flood Mitigation to include Water Reservoir - two objectives that are in complete diametric opposition. On the night of flood, Wivenhoe Dam was at 190% capacity (Dams are built to hold twice their official “capacity”). How it got to this point after weeks of rain is disturbing. The BOM had predicted - and we did have weeks and weeks of - non-stop rain. The Dam should have been slowly emptied over those weeks. Instead it was all released over these nights (plus a king tide) to produce the Brisbane 2011 Floods.

Please visit the Flood 2011 Photo Album for some images of the flood impact.

In my first Blog, I basically said that the Semantic Web is too complicated for the Web user.

A recent blog from Sandro Hawke (W3C) calling for a “Simplified RDF”, and a presentation (pdf) at the W3C Technical Plenary by Jeni Tennison talks of a “stack of complex technologies”. These have prompted me to write a followup.

RDF and OWL are two “competing” - and in the case of OWL - very complex languages. If I was a “working ontologist”, I would probably be very happy...but I am not, and so are 99.999% of the rest of the web users.

I can still remember a meeting we had with the W3C team - on a cold Winter December 1997 in Boston - to convince them of the need for a “Metadata” activity to tackle the issue of representing metadata on the web. At the time, the Dublin Core group was pushing this as there was no definitive road forward for web metadata. Even today, 13 years later, the DC group still seems to have lots of issues with encoding metadata in RDF/OWL (and even plain old XML). (The W3C Metadata Activity then grew into the Semantic Web Activity.)

What is needed is simple, and has been done before, by TimBL himself. He took the complex SGML and made a simpler HTML from it. Just by taking the most common core and simplicity wins out. SGML was for the hard-core publisher - which is not what your typical web user is. They needed something a lot simpler and lighter to use every day.

So following this, take only the “best bits” from both RDF and OWL, and the most “useful” bits - and create a new subset that is easy to use, implement, and more importantly, to understand.

I call this the Semantic Web Markup Language (SWML) - pronounced Swim-elle.

SWML will also make Linked Data more obvious and clearer and the one thing that will save the Semantic Web (ie Linked Data) should flourish and deliver on some of the promises...

How to do this? W3C needs to change and the Semantic Web leadership needs to make the (tough?) call and create a new group to design SWML. It’s been done before. The time is ripe for it to happen again.

As a researcher in the space of privacy and social networks, Facebook has been a great real-world use case of the pitfalls that these services need to deal with, and the challenges to researchers and developers to solve....Google runs a close second.
I contemplated leaving Facebook on May 31st (the Quit FaceBook Day) but decided not too. After all, I should be aware of the issues and technically capable to control my Privacy options on Facebook (and any other Social Network...)
However, today I feel insulted by the CEO of Facebook (Mr Mark Zuckerberg) as his recent negative comments about multiple identities on social networks (eg one for work, one for family, one for soccer mates, etc) - which in my view is essential for social systems to support as this is how humans naturally behave - with this quote:

“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”

So, Mr Zukerberg thinks I lack integrity. This from a person who called all social network users “dumb f...ks” for sharing information.

Thank you Mr Zukerberg, you have made the decision to leave that much easier now.

Tags: privacy

The Semantic Web has had its challenges over the years in trying to become mainstream. One of the most promising subareas (that has the best chance) is Linked Data. Not that LD is dependent on the SW - all you really need is consistent and persistent URIs and a way to say “sameAs” in a number of ways....SKOS could help here.

Anyway, TBL’s recent talk entitled “Linked data: it's is not like that; it's like a bag of potato chips” (see the video and blog) was not the answer. LD is not like a Bag of Chips. The information on the back has been standardised by government and social requirements. There is no linking between a “nut allergy” on a Italian bag of chips to an Australian bag of chips. The analogy falls short.

I agree there needs to be better efforts to explain all parts of the SW to broaden it’s impact, and we really need good use cases, analogies, stories to do it....

Other wise we will end up with the Semantic Web being like a box of chocolates !

Tags: Semantic Web