[LTER-im] RFC on licensing the LTER Controlled Vocabulary

[Wade Sheldon]

Hi everyone,

The IMC Controlled Vocabulary working group, led by John Porter, has received a variety of requests from other groups seeking to leverage the LTER vocabulary. Past inquiries have included included EnvThes (http://www.enveurope.eu/news/envthes-environmental-thesaurus), a European thesaurus that imported it wholesale, then added to it, NEON (via Christine Laney) and WHOI (via Janet Fredricks). Most recently, the Content Enrichment team at Wiley (a commercial publisher) has asked for permission to use the vocabulary and brought up the notion of licensing.

John has sought input from IM-Exec on how to license the vocabulary for use outside LTER. He is recommending we formally release the vocabulary under a CC0 (public domain) license. The keywords were drawn from so many sources that attribution would be problematic, and a CC0 license would support broadest use.

As you may recall the vocabulary was initially assembled by mining keywords used in LTER site metadata and then refined and augmented with input from working group members and other interested IMs. Because LTER sites all contributed to this effort, IM-Exec would like to give the IMC an opportunity to comment on this issue. Please reply to this email or contact me directly if you have an opinion you'd like to voice on what licensing is appropriate. I will collect feedback until the Nov 13 IMC VWC and then collate the results.

Thanks.

Wade Sheldon
GCE-LTER

-- 
____________________________________

  Wade M. Sheldon
  GCE-LTER Information Manager
  School of Marine Programs
  University of Georgia
  Athens, GA 30602-3636
  Email: sheldon at uga.edu
  WWW: http://gce-lter.marsci.uga.edu/bios/wsheldon