Create guidelines for OBO maintainers who want to be included in Wikidata

[cmungall]

Most OBOs are CC-BY, Wikidata requires CC-0. Some ontologies have apparently granted Wikidata permission to redistribute part or all of their ontology.

We want to make sure this is streamlined with a common process for everyone. Not clear to me how this should be done, ideas welcome, add below.

[mcourtot]

CC-by but attribution chosen is by PURL - as long as wikidata uses the PURL (perhaps replacing the URL formatter that currently links directly to AmiGO) I think it should be ok.

[elviram]

I agree that this needs to be written down somewhere. It would make everything much clearer and we could avoid getting into lengthy discussion later down the line, or even have to remove data, if something were to happen.

[andrewsu]

re: @mcourtot's comment, it's true that Wikidata probably generally satisfies the attribution requirement for CC-BY. But Wikidata itself is CC0, so if you grant Wikidata permission to use your data, then you also grant downstream users those same CC0 terms. So someone who downloads your ontology via Wikidata would not be required to attribute in any way.

[cmungall]

On 13 Jul 2016, at 8:39, Andrew Su wrote:

re: @mcourtot's comment, it's true that Wikidata probably generally
satisfies the attribution requirement for CC-BY. But Wikidata itself
is CC0, so if you grant Wikidata permission to use your data, then you
also grant downstream users those same CC0 terms. So someone who
downloads your ontology via Wikidata would not be required to
attribute in any way.

Additionally, this points to an assumption in the OBO license that
assumes a PURL for every unit of attributable work. What if I want to
produce an ontology that is purely axioms on an existing ontology? This
could be logical axioms (e.g. providing equivalence axioms for DO, or
logical definitions for CHEBI roles) or annotation axioms (e.g. a
translation to another language)? If I want to ensure attribution I
would have to add PURLs for every axiom, which can be a high overhead.

[NuriaQueralt]

Hi, this is Nuria a new post-doc in Andrew's lab. IMO, CC-BY license is a common license option for data providers groups in order to give visibility to their resources and to demonstrate their use by the community to funding agencies. Initiatives on the development of quality and resource use metrics in ELIXIR and NIH are ongoing to support decision-making in funding agencies. A win-to-win idea would be to suggest Wikidata to ELIXIR/NIH as one metrics component to compute resource use by the community. In this way, Wikidata could be used by funding agencies as a data endpoint to evaluate and identify relevant resources for the community, and could be used by data providers as a platform to make widely visible and available their resources to both the community and funding agencies. In this way, we will foster data providers to grant Wikidata permission for data sharing under CC0 license. I am not sure now if in Wikidata could be shown rankings such as number of downloads per year of ontologies, or number of citations per ontologies...

[elviram]

Hi Nuria, I have been in a quite a few Wikidata/Wikipedia meetings and the
one thing that is mentioned over and over is that they do not keep track of
users and data. It is all in the spirit of open and free data.
What is doable, is that we can look at how many times an item or property
is used. And there is always the possibility to point at how many times
Wikipedia and Wikidata are accessed.
I am all for your suggestion about ELIXIR/NIH.

What we could do with the licensing issues is draft a general agreement for
OBO ontologies and their free use in Wikidata. Anybody who would want their
ontology in Wikidata would have to sign/agree to it.

Cheers,
Elvira

On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 2:27 AM, Núria Queralt Rosinach <
notifications@github.com> wrote:

Hi, this is Nuria a new post-doc in Andrew's lab. IMO, CC-BY license is a
common license option for data providers groups in order to give visibility
to their resources and to demonstrate their use by the community to funding
agencies. Initiatives on the development of quality and resource use
metrics in ELIXIR and NIH are ongoing to support decision-making in funding
agencies. A win-to-win idea would be to suggest Wikidata to ELIXIR/NIH as
one metrics component to compute resource use by the community. In this
way, Wikidata could be used by funding agencies as a data endpoint to
evaluate and identify relevant resources for the community, and could be
used by data providers as a platform to make widely visible and available
their resources to both the community and funding agencies. In this way, we
will foster data providers to grant Wikidata permission for data sharing
under CC0 license. I am not sure now if in Wikidata could be shown rankings
such as number of downloads per year of ontologies, or number of citations
per ontologies...

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[goodb]

I like the idea of standardizing this process. That being said, we have made significant progress working through the addition of one resource at a time and getting permission one at a time. So.. whilst negotiations for an OBO-wide pattern continue, if we want data (e.g. Henning's suggestion of Reactome) in Wikidata, lets go ahead and ask the owners directly.

[goodb]

You know what would make this all go away? Making OBO Foundry require a CC0 license.

Lets try to answer the attribution problem with good software for tracking usage, not with lawyers writing text that is unenforceable for the bad guys and massively distracting (as demonstrated here) for the good guys.

To Elvira's point above. Actually Wikipedia/Wikidata does keep extensive logs on usage. I started a thread about gaining access to them for the purpose of building an attribution engine. Response was pretty positive, but I didn't have the bandwidth to follow it up.

[balhoff]

+1 for CC0. At least, I think it should be recommended more strongly (right now OBO recommends CC-BY).

cc @hlapp

[mcourtot]

Is there a specific reason Wikidata can't accommodate CC-BY? Other than "they don't want to".

[goodb]

This was a (good) decision made a long time ago and at a higher level than
we are operating on here that is not likely to change. Adding technology
to accommodate multiple licensing patterns in the same knowledge graph is
not trivial and would be a distraction from the main objective.

On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Melanie Courtot notifications@github.com
wrote:

Is there a specific reason Wikidata can't accommodate CC-BY? Other than
"they don't want to".

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[hlapp]

You know what would make this all go away? Making OBO Foundry require a CC0 license.

I fought quite hard to even allow CC0 in the respective OBO Foundry principle. The recommendation is still CC-BY (for, IMHO, poorly motivated reasons).

One argument I made during the discussions leading up to that was that in particular because of the Realism principle espoused by OBO Foundry, most of the content of an OBO Foundry ontology will be unlikely to even satisfy as creative expression. Others, most prominently @alanruttenberg, argued against that, citing previous case law (of which there isn't much, but there is precedent of some ontology in some field having been ruled eligible for copyright protection).

IMO, the stronger argument (which I have also made) is that CC-BY as a legal instrument is the wrong tool to bring to bear for declaring an attribution requirement and demanding compliance with it. Attribution can be given in many different ways that all satisfy the legal requirement of a CC-BY license, but very few of which will satisfy the mechanism of attribution we as scientists really want. So it's really a social norm that we request compliance with, not a legal one, and so a CC-BY license, by itself, adds very little if anything to stating what we expect in return for reuse.

Bottom line, I remain entirely in favor of requiring, or at the very least strongly recommending, that OBO Foundry ontologies be released under a CC0 waiver.