Linking Rights to Aggregations of Data (Part 1)

In my previous post Protecting your Linked Data I considered the dual questions of what legal regimes are available to linked data providers for the protection of their published datasets, and what technical frameworks and best practices exist especially within the realm of RDF and linked data to make such rights assertions. In this (shorter!) post I begin to consider an attribution scheme that comes to mind on the heels of discussions on the The New York Times Linked Open Data Community list, that of using named graphs (see also here) and specifically the OAI-ORE data model to associate specific rights to aggregations of resources.

What's the problem? Given a set -- an aggregation -- of data assertions, how might we properly assert rights over those assertions, especially in a way that a responsible client won't lose track of the ownership context? Lets assume a file of RDF triples is read into store. Consist with the NYTimes LOD discussion, we'll call the file people.rdf. Since "all RDF stores support named graphs these days" (Richard Cyganiak), a named graph URI shall be assumed to have been created and names the aggregation of assertions imported from "people.rdf" (i.e. the assertions in the file "people.rdf" from the provider become members of the named graph "people.rdf" in the client's RDF store.

Recall that a named graph is "a set of triples named by an URI." [ref] The OAI-ORE data model extends this with a set of guidelines for making assertions about aggregations that "describe" the named graph. ORE's core idea is to create one URI to represent the aggregation itself, and another to represent the resource map that we created to describe that aggregation. It should be in this OAI-ORE resource map that rights expressions applying to the aggregation should appear.

In my next post I'll take a stab a mocking up -- and hopefully not mucking up -- what an implementation of this might look like...