Ownership.

[Peter McCartney]

Im trying to make some comments on James's draft of a general public
data use agreement for LTER. James has used a very handy preamble to
define key partys (author/creator, metadata provider, data user, dataset
provider) referred to in the license, which i am trying to better
articulate with named roles in EML. In doing so, Im finding it difficult
to identify exacly who is the party with ownership of a resource (ie,
the rights to grant or deny access). There is widespread implication in
practice that it is creator, but with respect to publications, thats
definately not always the case. i have seen some EML files where a great
many individuals have been listed in the Creator slot in order to share
credit, but not necessarily to say that they hold intellectual rights
over the resource. The intellectual right element is free text with no
accompanying party element although the its documentation would tend to
lead someone to look here for ownership info. The LTER draft best
practices guide encourages the use of the Publisher element with
datasets, indicating that for most LTER products the LTER site should be
listed as the publisher. Im not sure how this squares what we are
calling "dataset Provider" - the latter seems to me more of a
distributor ( role that i think got dropped from the distribution
element) might not actually be the site - could be a metacat or some
other warehouse.Associated party allows you to identify various other
people in roles not given their own explicit element and one of those
roles is, in fact, "owner". However, Associated party is also optional,
so i dont think its a great place to count on finding what really should
be a required piece of information.
 
 
Most software is released with a generic license that identifies
standard roles without actually naming them in the text of the license.
So how do we unambigiously identify in EML who actually holds the
copyright to grant access to a datasource or even to release it to the
public domain? And how we can write a general use license that refers to
the owner "as designated in the dataset metadata element _______" in the
way we refer to the "data contact" as the party so designated in the
"Contact element" in the metadata?
 
 
Peter McCartney (peter.mccartney at asu.edu)
Center for Environmental-Studies
Arizona State University
 
 
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