STAplus License

[securedimensions]

STAplus needs to support custom attribution text

Use Case

STAplus supports the association of a license with the entities Datastream, Group, and Project. For attribution licenses, the re-use of the data requires to craft an attribution text. When using Creative Commons licenses, a recommended best practices can be followed.

However, in rare cases the creator of the Datastream, Group, or Project may want a custom attribution text to be used. In this case, the attribution text must be stored somewhere.

Proposed Solution

To support this use case, it is RECOMMENDED to store the custom attribution text as a property named attributionText in the properties of the entity Datastream, Group, or Project.

[securedimensions]

Alternative Solution

An alternative solution could recommend that the attributionText gets stored within the Properties object for the License entity. But such a solution might lead to license proliferation if each user creates the own license. In order to ensure that only compatible licenses get created by users, the Business Logic could define proper constraints. Let's illustrate this in an example based on Creative Commons licenses:

• The implementation creates the seven recommended licenses from Creative commons.
• Each license instance is identified by a unique definition URI.
• The implementation can control the creation of a license by checking the definition URI to make sure the license falls into the allowed licenses and only limit the created License to only contain the attributionText.
• This prevents the proliferation of licenses types (all licenses belong to the Creative Commons framework) and all licenses' compatibility can be determined via the definition URI.
• But the re-use of objects requires to use the attributionText.

Data Model Updating Proposal

The ensure interoperability for the above implementation option, the License entity should include the property attributionText and the STAplus standard should recommend the solution above.

In addition, the License entity property properties (JSON Object) should be removed to prevent proliferation of incompatible licenses!

[joanma747]

There is a precedent of removing properties from "Party" to pretect personal information. WE will have the same here to prevent the proliferation of "modifications" of standard licencies by adding properties.

We need attribution in here and I'm fine to use attributionText in licence. My first impression was that attribution belong to "Party" but I'm fine to have it in license.

[securedimensions]

The attributionText property is now added to the License. And the properties property is removed.