2012/9/5 Nadja Kutz nadja@daytar.de:
Is it planned by the Wikidata team that someone phones these people in Geneva and asks wether wikidata could at least base its ontology (here I mean in particular the overall classification scheme, like a hammer is a tool a.s.o) on the ISO Standard (eventually by purchasing this right) phone number: http://www.iso.org/iso/copyright.htm (in that way one would eventually not use their explicit texts and formats but could use at least their structural outline) ?
No, we currently do not have any plans to contact the people at ISO in order to discuss the topic you suggest. I think in the following answers you will find the why we do not have these plans.
side remark: In particular I still don't see that Wikidata may not run into legal issues with the ISO. or simply: If the ISO has an IP protection on the classification "a hammer is a tool" and if wikidata uses the same classification (because it is more or less the only one which makes sense) then wikidata may be doomed, bailiffs will come and carry your nice new chairs out of your office in schoeneberg and so on....
I am not a lawyer, but I want to point out that there is a distinction between Copyright and other IP protection. Whereas a text about the classification of hammers may (and usually is) copyrighted, the mere fact that a hammer is a tool can not be copyrighted.
Also, we need to make a distinction between the IP for the data model of Wikidata and the content of Wikidata. To give an analogy: the source code of MediaWiki is released under the GPL. The content of Wikipedia is released under a CC license. The discussion in this thread so far has centered around the data model that is described here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Data_model
This data model relates to RDF or topic maps. We did not discuss content in this thread so far, as far as I understood.
The relationship between hammers and tools would be part of the content, not of the data model.
Is there some rich sponsor who could buy their RDF classification (or topic map classification..?) and make it openly accessible? Whats the ISO opinion on that did someone check?
We did not check with the ISO on that. We did not search for sponsors in order to fund such a data contribution. There are a number of institutions already offering their data to Wikidata, as can be seen here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Data_collaborators
In my personal opinion, appropriately answering these requests has a higher priority than finding sponsors to buy and free further data sources. But anyway, these are decisions that the editor community of Wikidata has to take once Wikidata is deployed, and not a decision that the development team can answer as it is about the content of Wikidata. Just as the MediaWiki developers do not decide on the content of Wikipedia, the Wikidata developers do not decide on the content of Wikidata. I hope the distinction makes sense.
By the way, is there a specific classification that you have in mind, or are you asking in general?
Mr. Denny Vrandecic If you still don't understand these questions then please tell me exactly what you do not understand like which sentence, which word etc.
Mrs Nadja Kutz, thank you for the questions. I hope I answered them now.
Denny