Modelling the Compatibility of Licenses

• Published in: The Semantic Web pp. 255 - 269
• Main Authors: Moreau, Benjamin, Serrano-Alvarado, Patricia, Perrin, Matthieu, Desmontils, Emmanuel
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.01.2019
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 9783030213473; 3030213471
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-21348-0_17

Web applications facilitate combining resources (linked data, web services, source code, documents, etc.) to create new ones. For a resource producer, choosing the appropriate license for a combined resource is not easy. It involves choosing a license compliant with all the licenses of combined resources and analysing the reusability of the resulting resource through the compatibility of its license. The risk is either, to choose a license too restrictive making the resource difficult to reuse, or to choose a not enough restrictive license that will not sufficiently protect the resource. Finding the right trade-off between compliance and compatibility is a difficult process. An automatic ordering over licenses would facilitate this task. Our research question is: given a license\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$l_{i}$$\end{document}, how to automatically position\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$l_{i}$$\end{document}over a set of licenses in terms of compatibility and compliance? We propose CaLi, a model that partially orders licenses. Our approach uses restrictiveness relations among licenses to define compatibility and compliance. We validate experimentally CaLi with a quadratic algorithm and show its usability through a prototype of a license-based search engine. Our work is a step towards facilitating and encouraging the publication and reuse of licensed resources in the Web of Data.