A support tool to enhance understanding of Creative Commons licenses: Glossary/Thesaurus of Creative Commons Licenses
The Creative Commons Italian Chapter, in collaboration with its institutional member Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems (IGSG) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), presented at the 2020 CC Global Summit the initiative to implement a Glossary/Thesaurus of Creative Commons Licenses (CC licenses).
Thanks to the expertise and specialisations of the IGSG, the initiative intends to create a tool to improve awareness, understanding and dissemination of CC licences, as well as cooperation between CC Chapters and consolidation of the whole community in this direction.
From an operational perspective, the initiative regards the development of two distinct resources: the Glossary and the Thesaurus, which work together to facilitate and improve the understanding and interpretation of CC licences and thus increase their implementation.
The Glossary provides definitions of specific terms within the CC licences. The sources of such definitions come from the texts of the licences, FAQs issued by the Creative Commons Global Network, material approved by the Italian Chapter and CC Certificate for Educators and Librarians materials.
The Thesaurus offers a conceptual representation of the specific domain including semantic relationship. In particular, the Thesaurus has been implemented according to the ISO 25964–1 standard, which defines it as a “controlled and structured vocabulary in which concepts are represented by terms, organized so that relationships between concepts are made explicit, and referred terms are accompanied by lead-in entries for synonyms or quasi-synonyms”.
Both the Glossary and the Thesaurus constitute a collection of concepts and definitions linked by relationships of three well-known types: equivalence, hierarchical and associative. Particular attention is paid to Open Education, through the choice of specific terminology concerning this area.
The study aims to offer an overview of the specific terminology of the CC licences, allowing experts and non-experts to understand them in detail through the use of a linguistic and conceptual tool, declined in different languages. Furthermore, according to an overall growth and shared representation of knowledge, the Glossary/Thesaurus will be represented in SKOS — Simple Knowledge Organisation System: a system of languages developed specifically with the aim of representing any kind of structured vocabulary, for the semantic web.
The initiative is currently at an early stage and needs an extension of the number of entries as wide and complete as possible in order to include all relevant terms and become a functional tool for the proper understanding and application of CC licenses. Anyone interested in participating in the initiative and collaborating in the drafting of the Glossary/Thesaurus can send an email to: [email protected].
Once a sufficiently complete version of the Glossary/Thesaurus has been obtained, the next goal will be to collaborate with the other CC chapters in order to obtain as many translations as possible in different languages, with a view to sharing and wide dissemination.
The editorial guidelines provide that for each entry in the Glossary/Thesaurus the following will be available: the English translation; the definition (the one already offered by the License, or the one in a FAQ, or a definition elaborated by the CC Italian Chapter) and its source; synonyms, broader terms, narrower terms and related terms; note to specify, where necessary, information that is excluded from the definition.
