Using RDFa for Attribution and licensing

By Rob Linton on November 20, 2008

Well…  despite my complaining about RDFa, we have managed to cobble together something fairly easily.  Almost everything we need for the properties is found in the Dublin Core terms namespace.  We’ve taken a stab at writing a vocabulary document to define the extra attribution properties that can help systems track media over the Web.  Those are:

  • attributionCopied: Indicates that the described resource is a copy of the related resource from which it is derived. See also: The need for an attribution trail.
  • attributionModified: Indicates that the described resource is a modified copy of the related resource from which it is derived.
  • attributionDerived: Indicates that the described resource is a derivative work of the related resource from which it is derived. See also: Reusing Content: Derived Work vs Modified Work

These vocabularies let us specify how various copies of media spread throughout the Web are related to each other. The vocabulary document is here: http://playtheweb.org/rdf/

Then we can use the Dublin Core terms to fill out the information a little more broadly.  Specifically title, identifier, date and license.  More detail could be added, but those are the baseline needs.

This is a bit barebones at the moment. It certainly can be improved. I’ve been thinking that it might be better to use a single term to denote a relationship and another set of triples to describe the kinds of relationships rather than having a separate relationship term for every type.

There also needs to be more work on how to denote an attribution trail, especially when an object is a mash-up from multiple sources.

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