COLIS ODRL METADATA PROFILE

http://www.iprsystems.com/COLIS/COLIS-ODRL-Profile-06.pdf

Out of the Australian-based COLIS project was produced this metadata profile for using ODRL to express the rights for learning objects in IMS Content Packages. This was originally published about 18 months ago, but still seems useful, and as far as I can tell hasn’t been supplanted.

The COLIS Project (renamed and extended as the “Interaction of IT Systems and Repositories” or IIS&R Project) seems to have finished much of its work this past December, and is now engaging in a series of tours around Australia to disseminate its findings. A number of reports and presentations are available on their site – of particular interest to me was a presentation on the “‘Use and Useability of Learning Objects within the COLIS Demonstrator Framework.” It is interesting to see the similarities in the difficulties it outlines (cataloguing time, standard vocabularies, versioning, DRM issues) to other existing projects. SWL

Intellectual Property Rights Issues Facing Self-archiving: Key Findings of the RoMEO Project

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/
gadd/09gadd.html#Gadd-2003f

This interesting paper details the efforts of the RoMEO project to land on, amongst other things, a digital rights schema to enable self-archiving of academic research papers in the U.K. What’s interesting is that while they found that either the Creative Commons or ODRL could possibly fit their needs, the problem with the CC solution was that their metadata was expressed in RDF/XML and did not have an associated XML schema—a prerequisite for any metadata disclosed under the OAI-PMH. Their solution was to develop ODRL versions (XML instances) of the CC licences that would conform to the ODRL XML schema, examples of which can be found in the paper. A more detailed accounting of this process can also be found in the related paper, “Rights metadata for open archiving.” – SWL

NameProtext – crawling your site to protect against trademark violations

http://www.nameprotect.com/

You kind of knew this was happening somehow, but here’s the public face of it. Check your server log analysis for ‘unrecognized agents’ with the name “NPBot http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html)” and this is who it is; a bot that scours the web for unauthorized uses of brand names and trademarks. I expect this is a very small example of all the bots currently keeping tabs on what you say. (Although apparently it honours robots.txt, so…) – SWL