Dear all, last month the Past Thinking blog [1] reported about the Heathrow T5 archaeology data released under Creative Commons license [2].
The raw excavation data has been released in a variety of useful formats (including XML and GML, CSV, SHP), under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license [3]. In short words, this means that you can use them for whatever you like, as long as you don’t make money from their use. As remarked by Tom on his blog, this "is quite a milestone", because the T5 excavation is a really important and large one. So, this is perhaps the first time (or one of the first times) that archaeological data are released under such an "Open Content" license. More data will be eventually published under these terms, based on this example. One question that comes to me is whether the Creative Commons can apply to archaeological data, because of their unique nature where objective facts are tightly mixed with subjective interpretations and choices (btw, this is a big and controversial topic of archaeological theory and I'm not going into the details). Choosing a Creative Commons license suggests that the "subjective" part is somehow more important, and thus the archaeologist retains the copyright on her/his work (the CC stuff only applies in case of copyright). The counterpart is the famous "Facts are free" motto, that should apply in any case where data are "objective" and thus there is lack of creativity by the author/archaeologist. In such a case, if one chooses to publish data from an excavation|survey|experiment, data should ideally be in the public domain (at least in countries where PD exists). I know this sounds all like useless legalese stuff, but I do think discussing about it is very important, given the fact that more and more archaeological data will go public through the WWW in the next few years, and this is already happening [4][5]. As always, practice is one step beyond theory. This is why we started talking about Creative and Science Commons at the Genoa Workshop last May. I'd like to hear some discussion from the list about this topic, perhaps revamping the "Data sharing" issue seen here months ago. Best, Stefano [1] http://www.pastthinking.com/blog/ [2] http://snipurl.com/1r5rk [3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/20/ [4] http://opencontext.org/ [5] http://pleiades.stoa.org/places -- Stefano Costa [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.iosa.it Archeologia e Software Libero Io uso Debian GNU/Linux! -- Mailing list info: http://lists.linux.it/listinfo/archaeology
