stac-spec
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radiantearth
Access / License details
From a user-perspective, it seems very valuable to know whether assets are publicly/freely available or not. For the SPDX licenses it's easy to grasp, but often there are custom terms and license is set to proprietary. So that doesn't help with that. I think we should think about a way to encode these information.
In openEO, we simply use paid: true/false, but that is maybe a bit too simplified? Maybe it needs more fields and the creative commons modules come to mind for inspiration.
Just putting this out here for discussions. I feel like this info is crucial to have from a user-perspective.
One option we've been considering is a whole-of-life licencing/access description. Our archive has data from the 1930s to present day, with licencing and access permissions that change with age (e.g. internal only until 3 yrs old, CC-BY until 50 yrs old, public domain after that). The objective is to clearly specify the licencing/access transitions when data is first captured, rather than trying to do detective work in 5-10 years time.
The fields we're using for each licence period are:
- Name
- Description
- Link (to SPDX / CreativeCommons / licence file)
- End year (although this could also be expressed as start/end datetimes)
- Information security classification (internal requirement)
In our STAC Items/Collections we currently just link to this whole-of-life definition file and use proprietary in the licence field (even when the current licencing may be CC-BY or similar). It's in our improvement pipeline to investigate a process to extract the current licence type and populate the licence field, but the need to undertake frequent updates is a concern for me. If there is interest to develop an extension for more detailed licence/access description, we would be happy to collaborate.
Discussed on call. This should probably be an extension, have more information about how people can access protected API's. Also let people specify license text completely.
Came up again in a project, and is now more relevant than ever as we now have Collection Search. It would be nice if there would be some more possibilities to search for specific categories of licenses (e.g. whether something is free to download, free to reuse, free to reuse commercially, Share-alike, etc). A small extension that allows to search on some license criteria per collection would be good.