Relicensing Combined Datasets (ReCoDa)

Problem: Combination of datasets with different licensing

With the increasing spread of Open Data and metadata portals (e.g. OPAL), open datasets are available for use and combination. Since datasets can be licensed under different conditions, the combination of datasets and the selection of an appropriate license for republication can become complicated. Various approaches have emerged that allow, for example, a pairwise comparison of licenses. Although the approaches are helpful, in many cases they do not support the comparison of a combination of multiple licenses.

Creative Commons License Compatibility Chart (source)

Solution: Comparison of license attributes

Licenses can be specified by their attributes. Attributes types are, for instance, permissions, requirements or prohibitions. ReCoDa selects the most restrictive license attributes and compares the result with other licenses. This allows to compute compatible licenses for republishing and relicensing combined datasets.

Try the demo

The ReCoDa demo consits of 3 steps. First, a knowledge base has to be selected. Knowledge bases contain licenses specified by the same attributes. In the second step, licenses to combine have to be chosen. Finally, you can select one of the computed compatible licenses.