Ontology sharing and copyright considerations

Science Commons helps the W3C in making "knowledge sharing more efficient". [3nov09]

OWL 2 – a standard web ontology language – was formally recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of their Semantic Web activity.

From the W3C’s announcement:

“[OWL 2] allows people to capture their knowledge about a particular domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it. Furthermore, as an open standard based on Web technology, it lowers the cost of merging knowledge from multiple domains.”

Science Commons’ Alan Ruttenberg has been diligently working with the OWL working group specifying OWL 2 at the W3C to push this recommendation through. The W3C says that the transition to OWL 2 is a reflection of user experience with OWL, and the need to enable seamless integration and scalability.

This resource - “Ontology Copyright Licensing Considerations” - explores when copyright may apply to an ontology as well as a number of other concerns regarding protection and the means to achieve that.

Read more on Science Commons' blog.