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Licence information in schema.org and LRMI

Phil Barker — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 10:58:54 +0000

When the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) technical working group started its work it focused on identifying the properties and relationships that were important for educational resources but could not be adequately expressed using schema.org as it then stood. One of those important pieces of information was the licence under which a resource was released, and so the LRMI spec from the start had the property useRightsUrl “The URL where the owner specifies permissions for using the resource.” When schema.org adopted most of the LRMI properties, useRightsUrl was an exception, it was not adopted pending further consideration–not surprising really given the wide-ranging applicability of licence information beyond learning resources.

Back in June the good news came that with version 1.6 of schema.org included a license property for Creative Works that does all that LRMI wanted, and more.

What does this mean for LRMI adopters?

Some adopters of LRMI have already started using useRightsUrl. Such implementations are valid LRMI but not valid schema.org, which means that they will only be understood by applications that have been written specifically to understand LRMI and not by the general purpose web-scale search applications. This is sub-optimal.

In passing, let me mention another complication. With schema.org you have a choice of syntax: microdata and RDFa 1.1 lite. With RDFa there was already a mechanism for identifying a link to a licence, that is rel=”license”. Just to complicate a little more, RDFa allows name spacing, and the term license appears in at least three widely used namespaces: HTML5, Dublin Core Terms, and the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language–hopefully this will never matter to you. To exemplify one of these options I’ll use the HTML that you get when you use the Creative Commons License Chooser (but let’s be absolutely clear, what I am writing about applies to any type of license whether the terms be open or commercial):

The good news is that all these options play nicely together, you can have the best of all worlds.

If you are already using itemprop=”useRightsUrl” to identify the link to a licence using LRMI in microdata, you can also use the license property and rel=”license”. The following LRMI microdata with a bit RDFa thrown in works:


  
    
        Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence

If you are using LRMI / schema.org in RDFa, then the following is valid


  
    
       Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence

License does what LRMI asked for and more

In my opinion the schema.org license property is superior to the LRMI useRightsUrl for a few reasons. It does everything that LRMI wanted by way of identifying the URL of the licence under which the creative work is released, but also:

It belongs to a more widely recognised namespace, especially important if you are wanting to generate RDF data
I prefer the semantics of the name and definition: a license can include restrictions of use as well as grant rights and permissions.
the range, i.e. the type of value that can be provided, includes Creative Works as well as Urls

That last points allows one to encode the name, url, description, date, accountable person and a whole host of other information about the licence (albeit at the cost of the not being able to do so alongside LRMI’s useRightsUrl quite so simply)

Summary

The inclusion in schema.org of the license property is good news for aims for LRMI. If you use LRMI and care about licensing you should tag the information you provide about the license with it. If you already use LRMI’s useRightsUrl or RDFa’s rel=”license” there is no need to stop doing so.

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Who is using LRMI metadata?

Phil Barker — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 11:13:36 +0000

One question that we always get asked about LRMI is “who is using it?” There are two sides to this, use by search service providers and use by resource providers, this post touches on the latter.

In phase 2 of the LRMI project, various organizations were given small amounts of money to implement LRMI in their systems and workflows. Those organizations are listed on the Creative Commons web site, and Lorna is in the process of gathering together the lessons they learnt which will be reported back shortly. Perhaps more importantly, at least from the point of view of sustainability, are implementations that arise spontaneously, either by organizations with learning resources to disseminate who make a conscious decision to use LRMI, or those who in using schema.org markup find that one of the properties that LRMI added is appropriate. Of course no one doing this is under any obligation to inform us of what they are doing, so it is harder to keep track of such use. Fortunately the Google Custom Search Engine Wilbert and I cobbled together can be used to discover such implementations. It’s a bit hit-and-miss, you need to search for common topics (Math, English) and trawl through the results for new sites, but it’s better than nothing.

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LRMI at the Cetis conference 2014

Phil Barker — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 12:18:52 +0000

On 17th-18th June, in Bolton, Cetis had their more-or-less annual conference. One of the sessions was Lorna and me, with some help from our friends, discussing LRMI addressing the question “What on Earth Could Justify Another Attempt at Educational Metadata?” Lorna started with an overview of our involvement in educational metadata, from EEVL and FAILTE, through […]

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Where to put your EPUB metadata

Phil Barker — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 10:18:03 +0000

Even in the knowledge that current mainstream EPUB readers and applications for managing eBooks will most likely ignore all but the most trivial metadata, we still have use cases that involve more sophisticate metadata. For example we would like to use the LRMI alignment object in schema.org to say that a particular subsection of a book can be useful in the context of a specific unit in a shared curriculum.

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Heads up for HEDIIP

Phil Barker — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 14:10:30 +0000

A while back I summarised the input about semantics and academic coding that Lorna and I had made on behalf of Cetis for a study on possible reforms to JACS, the Joint Academic Coding System. That study has now been published.

JACS is mainatained by HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) and UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) as a means of classifying UK University courses by subject; it is also used by a number of other organisations for classification of other resources, for example teaching and learning resources. The report (with appendices) considers the varying requirements and uses of subject coding in HE and sets out options for the development of a replacement for JACS.

Of course, this is all only of glancing interest, until you realise that stuff like Unistats and the Key Information Set (KIS) are powered by JACS.
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