LOF-P-001: Open

Draft for ratification

Part of the founding draft of the LOF principles.

Summary

The ontology is openly available and may be used by all without constraint other than attribution.

Purpose

Legal ontologies are infrastructure for courts, agencies, researchers, and developers across jurisdictions. Restrictive licenses fragment that infrastructure and prevent the integration the Foundry exists to support.

Recommendations and requirements

1. The ontology is released under CC BY 4.0 or CC0 1.0.
2. The license is declared in the ontology header with dcterms:license whose value is the license IRI.
3. The same license is recorded in the ontology's registry metadata.

Implementation

Add Annotation(dcterms:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>) to the ontology header. The ontology template does this by default.

Examples

The header of every file generated from the LOF ontology template declares CC BY 4.0.

Criteria for review

The ontology header and the registry entry declare the same permitted license. Content derived from sources with incompatible licenses (for example, proprietary legal databases) is not included.

Automated check: ROBOT report check missing_ontology_license; registry schema validation of license.

Feedback and discussion

Propose changes to this principle by pull request against docs/principles/lof-p-001-open.md, or open a thread in Discussions.

Discussion