[Obo-format] exposing terms of reuse in an interoperable way

[Hilmar L. <hl...@ne...>]

It seems that currently the terms of reuse ("license") for OBO 1.4  
format ontologies go under the same tag as any comment, namely  
"remark". At least that's what the documentation suggests - is that  
current or are other plans being considered?

The terms of reuse are a rather important piece of metadata for an  
ontology, and in the age of increasing use of, and therefore  
increasing number of ontologies, determining those terms in a machine- 
assisted way is rather important (and in fact meanwhile well  
recognized for data in the Linked Data world [1]). The metadata  
vocabulary standards for denoting terms of reuse are dc:rights [2],  
dcterms:rights [3], and dcterms:license [4]. For Linked Data, the  
Linked Data Book recommends cc:license [1], whereas the W3C note on  
VoID [5] recommends dcterms:license and the Waiver vocabulary terms [6].

Ideally we would have two tags - one for denoting the actual license  
as a URL, and one for stating additional declarations regarding norms  
of reuse and attribution, as well as rules for transformation that  
have this come out appropriately in the OWL translation.

For example, this is the terms of reuse for the TAO:
"To the extent possible under law, Wasila M. Dahdul has waived all  
copyright and related or neighboring rights to the Teleost Anatomy  
Ontology (TAO), under CC0 license (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ 
). This work is published from the United States. It is requested that  
users of this vocabulary cite the following publication: Dahdul, W.M.,  
Lundberg, J.G., Midford, P.E., Balhoff, J.P., Lapp, H., Vision, T.J.,  
Haendel, M.A., Westerfield, M., and Mabee, P.M. (2010). The Teleost  
Anatomy Ontology: anatomical representation for the genomics age.  
Systematic Biology 59, 369-383. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syq013"

Currently this is a remark: tag and comes out in the OWL translation  
as oboInOwl:remark, as which it is virtually lost for all machine- 
processing.

Instead, this should come out as the following triples:
<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/tao.owl> a owl:Ontology ;
	dcterms:licence http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ;
	wv:declaration "To the extent possible under law, Wasila M. Dahdul  
has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the  
Teleost Anatomy Ontology (TAO), under CC0 license (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ 
). This work is published from the United States. It is requested that  
users of this vocabulary cite the following publication: Dahdul, W.M.,  
Lundberg, J.G., Midford, P.E., Balhoff, J.P., Lapp, H., Vision, T.J.,  
Haendel, M.A., Westerfield, M., and Mabee, P.M. (2010). The Teleost  
Anatomy Ontology: anatomical representation for the genomics age.  
Systematic Biology 59, 369-383. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/ 
syq013" .

Or alternatively use dc:rights instead of wv:declaration.

How can we best facilitate this by proper use of OBO headers?

	-hilmar

[1] http://linkeddatabook.com/editions/1.0/#htoc48
[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#elements-rights
[3] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-rights
[4] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#terms-license
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/void/#license
[6] http://vocab.org/waiver/terms/
-- 
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
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