Paper accepted at ESWC 2019

The paper Modelling the Compatibility of Licenses by Benjamin Moreau, Patricia Serrano-Alvarado, Matthieu Perrin, and Emmanuel Desmontils was accepted for publication in the Research Track at ESWC 2019.

Abstract. Web applications facilitate combining resources (linked data, web services, source code, documents, etc.) to create new ones. For a resource producer, choosing the appropriate license for a combined re- source is not easy. It involves choosing a license compliant with all the licenses of combined resources and analysing the reusability of the result- ing resource through the compatibility of its license. The risk is either, to choose a license too restrictive making the resource difficult to reuse, or to choose a not enough restrictive license that will not sufficiently protect the resource. Finding the right trade-off between compliance and com- patibility is a difficult process. An automatic ordering over licenses would facilitate this task. Our research question is: given a license l_i, how to au- tomatically position l_i over a set of licenses in terms of compatibility and compliance? We propose CaLi, a model that partially orders licenses. Our approach uses restrictiveness relations among licenses to define compati- bility and compliance. We validate experimentally CaLi with a quadratic algorithm and show its usability through a prototype of a license-based search engine. Our work is a step forward to facilitate and encourage the publication and reuse of licensed resources in the Web of Data.