On Jan 9, 2007, at 6:43 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
1) The terms of service says: "Except as expressly prohibited on
the Site, you are permitted to view, copy, print and distribute
publications and documents within this Site, subject to your
agreement that:... You will display the below copyright notice and
other proprietary notices on every copy you make"
I read this as saying that anything submitted to the repository
would be copyright "Copyright © 2005–2006, The Board of Trustees of
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.", which I
would guess some would consider unacceptable.
That certainly was not our intention, Alan, but I will take another
look at our boilerplate.
2) Termination of Use: You agree that The National Center for
Biomedical Ontology may, in its sole discretion, at any time
terminate your access to the Site and any account(s) you may have
in connection with the Site. Access to the Site may be monitored by
The National Center for Biomedical Ontology.
This is scary. There ought to be explicit cause for termination,
otherwise people might be reluctant to entrust their work to the site.
Good point.
3) Disclaimer: "... PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE"
BASIS...". The W3C has taken steps to ensure that access to the
files hosted at the W3C domain will be maintained under a variety
of circumstances, using mirrors, externals services, etc. It would
be desirable that similar actions be taken by the NCBO, and some
mention of them included in the terms of service, particularly if
URIs in the bioontology.org namespace are to be used.
Point well taken.
4) Use of ontologies: "Only the submitter of the ontology will be
able to modify it or submit new versions". In a project such as
ours that is group oriented, it is likely that individuals will
come and go. I think there needs to be some notion of group access
so that we aren't vulnerable to a key individual becoming unavailable.
We'll add this as a new requirement. We need to be more clear about
who "the submitter" is.
5) It wasn't clear to me whether there was developer support e.g.
svn access. I don't know whether Helen et. all had in mind using
such services at W3C, but such access is certainly part of the
development cycle of projects such as ours. Is the model that
ontology developers use external sites for this and only submit
relatively stable versions of the ontology to the BioPortal?
Currently, BioPortal is meant to be used as a repository only.
Future releases may have more support of broader development activities.
We are still in a pre-release mode until Feb 1, and these comments
are extremely valuable to us. As the workof the HCLS SIG is
precisely the kind of activity that we have a mandate to support, we
very much want to work with you to make our resource work for you.
Your feedback has already been very helpful.
Mark