OPEN DATA
OPEN DATA
I had the good fortune to be very involved in the early stages of the open data movement from a legal and licensing perspective, and worked in this space (including in the related open content space) primarily from 2004 to around 2013.
I'm most proud of founding Open Data Commons, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Open Data Commons provides a set of open data licensing tools, including:
The PDDL – a public domain dedication tool that allows governments, people, and organizations to give up their legal rights over data and place a work completely in the public domain (without copyright or database rights).
The Open Database License (ODbL), which is a copyleft database license.
The Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY), which is a license that requires you give credit to the database’s creator.
For Open Data Commons, I was the principal drafter of the three licences, with a lot of help from Prof. Charlotte Waelde, and the comments and feedback from an active community comment period. I'm indebted to many others in the open knowledge space, including Dr. Rufus Pollock and the entire OKF and Creative Commons community during that time frame.
While all three licences were successes in their own way, I continue to be really happy that Open Street Map adopted the ODbL and that several government bodies use the PDDL to fully open their data. You can check out who is using the licences on the web as well as find surveys such as Contracting Tools for Transportation Data.
What is Open?
Wondering what we mean by “open”? Go over to OpenDefinition.org to find out more.
You can also find previous open data presentations at https://www.slideshare.net/jordanhatcher
Fireside chat on open data at I ❤️ SF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l5tjAA5WxE (Jan 2025)
An intro to Open Data Commons at Future Everything May 2010.
Show and Tell: Open Data Commons at Open Source Show and Tell (OSSAT) April 2010.
Open Data and the Law, as part of the Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web tutorial at International Semantic Web Conference 2009. This was a half day tutorial, and everyone’s slides are up on the ISWC wiki.
Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons project. Oxford Internet Institute, March 2008.
Open data and database licensing, University of Glasgow, Legal Environment of Digital Curation, November 2007.
Open Data and the Law, Nodalities Magazine, (2010).
Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons project. Open Source Business Resource, (February 2008) <http://www.osbr.ca/>
Richard Poynder, Open and Shut?. Richard kindly asked me for an interview, the results of which are now up at: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2010/10/interview-with-jordan-hatcher.html. 18 October 2010.
Semantic Web Company: Jordan S. Hatcher: “Why we can’t use the same open licensing approach for databases as we do for content and software.“