Incoherent notes jotted down during the day.
First up: Jeremy Keith – Open data
Intro with Domesday book and digital preservation. Digital preservation is wrapped up with open formats vs. closed.
Qualities of open vs. closed formats. Open source development – comparison with natural selection. Standardisation – compromised + standardised preferable to proprietry + perfect. However, compare ease of development in Flash vs. pain of cross-browser development in HTML/CSS.
The strength of HTML is simplicity. Simplicity brings a longer lifespan (and wide authorship – low barrier to entry?)
Don’t talk about making the web accessible – talk about keeping the web accessible.
APIs as an accessibility feature – I like this! Make your data available as RSS alongside HTML – woo! Restricted/crippled data is doomed – mentions licensing of OS maps as an example. This is oversimplified – museums have massive problems over ownership of information. Just ignore it and publish anyway? Look at how wikipedia is redistributing museum pictures regardless of permission.
Characteristics of the web – standards, simplicity, sharing.
On rights and licencing – Flickr Commons uses a new licence for orphan works – no known owner. Need to overcome fear and stop assuming the worst. Publish, then apologise if you publish something you don’t have rights to. Don’t lock everything up because of a few doubts.
“Publish, then apologise if you publish something you don’t have rights too.”
Er, no.
What a dreadful attitude.
I think Jeremy’s got a good point there. I oversimplified as I was scribbling my notes down. The point refers to cases where the copyright holder is unknown. For example, this model of a collapsible lifeboat. If it were to turn out that the National Maritime Museum (NMM) don’t have the right to publish it, then they’d apologise and take it down.
Where the copyright owner is known, of course, then the NMM can’t publish or redistribute without permission eg. http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=AAA2287
Hence I can publish RSS feeds for the NMM collections, but I can’t make those feeds available under a Creative Commons licence for others to use.