Technical Team/Minutes/2011-02-15

Attendees

• Ann Thorton
• Kristin Newcomer
• Bill Schineller
• Peter Williams
• Kate Stewart
• Gary O'Neall

Note: Next weeks meeting will be at 1:00 Eastern time

Agenda

License Repository (bug ID 592) - review Peter's draft rdfa html

Domain model diagram (fromt the discussion on bug ID 644) - review Kate's diagram (postponed due to time)

License Repository:

Review of the web pages:

• On the summary web page, there are just 2 columns - full name and short form identifier
• The license detail page would contain the full name, short identifier, other web pages for this license, notes, text, templated version of text, "official header", templated header
• Template column/field - There was a discussion whether the template text should be a separate field from the text field:
• Exact format of the abstract license template text TBD
• Current working guidelines are:
• no capitalization
• white space condense (single blank represents multiple blanks and tabs)
• alternatives denoted as [a|b] for cases of acceptable spelling differences - for instance, british vs american spelling of common word.
• [.*] to denote any value is acceptable - for instance, after a copyright statement.
• Defining the abstract license template format of the license text is out of scope for the technical team, this will come from the legal team. The technical team will review for technical implement ability.
• Suggestion that getting FOSSology/Ninka experts to do the review of the the abstract license template syntax, based on what their tools can recognize, and what they do already as part of their matching. If Open Logic or Black Duck want to contribute information from their recognition algorithms, that would be welcome too. To be discussed in a future meeting once we nail down the format a bit more.
• legal team agreed that having a separate field for template would be useful (ie. it would be good to have both the official human readable formatted version available on the license detail web page as well as the abstract license template version on the license detail web page.)
• for now, this template field will default to the same text as the license text
• no property for for the license name. In the proposal, dc:title is used for the name – Proposal to for the SPDX spec to include a license name. Proposal to add this after beta. To be discussed
• License ID - should it be generated from the URL or have a separate tag? (Gary: I think we agreed on it being a property, but I did not confirm this on the call)
• no property to store the header
• no property to store abstract license template template
• no property to store license notes
• No property to store the other URL’s. owl:sameas currently used for the other urls in the license, should we add it in the SPDX spec as a separate appendix or in a license specific section.
• Header text (could have multiple headers are in the text). The data model will support multiple headers, but we will only use one for now.
• Issues with spreadsheet license text was discussed throughout the call. There were 2 issues – formatting is lost and some license text is too large for the spreadsheet cell. A proposal was made to have the spreadsheet license text cell reference a file which would be formatted using HTML tags.
• We also talked about headers, and abstract template versions of the headers. To keep things sane for beta at least, only a single header will be recognized for each license initially, preferably the official recognized one, if it exists.

Action: Add the missing properties to the spec. In general, if there is a column in the license spreadsheet from legal, it should be a property in the spec.

Action: Proposal for the license text column to refer (optionally) to a text file which will be included with the license spreadsheet.