Automatically Calculating the Adherence to License Requirements

Through the experiences of building several information infrastructures in Australia we have come to wanting to calculate the properties of data licenses in as automated a fashion as possible. To do this, we have trialed decomposing licenses into individual requirements, building on the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (CC REL) information model (http://creativecommons.org/ns). Such a decomposition, along with the separation of rights management from licenses as per the Open Data Rights Statement vocabulary (ODRS) model (http://schema.theodi.org/odrs/), allows us to model very many different licenses as simple collections of common requirements. In Car & Stenson (2015) we posited requirement resolution actions that systems or people can undertake that satisfy individual requirements and show how systems can b e made to automatically satisfy certain classes of requirements but certainly not all.

We are not currently able to automate every aspect of license requirement adherence and we believe that full automation is impossible, however every bit of automation improves the efficiency of data delivery.

In this presentation we report on some aspects of our license model, including the modelling of requirements and their resolutions. We also show how such modelling can enhances data access by comparing the status quo and possible future delivery of data via a large multi -agency, Australian data generation project; the Bioregional Assessments Programme.