Make: copyright

This was a talk about Copyright by Rowan Wilson at the University of Oxford in 2011.

There is a Ripple Project (education) has a few other resources including a ‘toolkit’ with an interesting video about copyright – http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ripple/

General information about Intellectual Property can be found at http://ipo.gov.uk and especifically about Copyright at: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy.htm

Interesting points about this talk was:

Copyright comes to existence at the same time that the work is fixed (in fixed form). An “original” is defined as a work that some labour was added to it, effort to create
Contractors/consultants own their own work, unless you/employer/University says otherwise
Always check your contract details if you plan to keep copyright of your creations either in form of presentation, artwork, programming code, etc.
Moral rights – adapt/modify and put in opposite context (for example)
On regulations/rules, in general a server/page could be taken down because of defamation/infringement in about 24hs
One interesting example of copyright was photos of Eiffel Tower at night that is copyrighted by the French Government, and in theory, you shouldn’t publish any of your pictures of it with the risk of infringement of copyright

There are a few interesting remarks about fair dealings exceptions:

research and private study
criticism, review and news reporting (using minimum of material)
things for purpose of instruction/examination
exceptions libraries/librarians (can make copies for readers)

Copyright licence has many factors: exclusive/non-exclusive, territorial, timed, etc.

You can find context you can share, use and remix via http://search.creativecommons.org/

Open educational resources (podcasts) from the University of Oxford – http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open

Open Learn from the Open University – http://www.open.edu/openlearn/

Vocabularies

I realise that sometimes some of the meanings of the words we are using are missed or misunderstood. So I went to Wikepedia and got a few definitions to clarify some of these concepts that we are using and frequently referr to.

”Vocabulary’‘ is the set of words a person is familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge.

”Ontology’‘ is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. Principal questions of ontology are “What can be said to exist?”, “Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?”, “What are the meanings of being?”, “What are the various modes of being of entities?”

”Taxonomy” is the practice and science of classification. A taxonomy, or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classification (“the taxonomy of …”), arranged in a hierarchical structure. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviors, or constraints.

A ”thesaurus” is a book that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning (containing synonyms and sometimes antonyms), in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. In Information Science, Library Science, and Information Technology, specialized ”thesauri” are designed for information retrieval. They are a type of controlled vocabulary, for indexing or tagging purposes. Such a thesaurus can be used as the basis of an index for online material.

”Folksonomy” is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.

All this because I’m working on vocab.ox.ac.uk

Bluepages

The bluepages finally started to take more shape and direction after a couple of meetings with Sally and the team. The layout that inspired the initial design was the Really Wild Flowers website.

One of the documents that highlight the BRII blue pages layout considerations / ideas [google doc – need authorisation for viewing] can be read online for start.

The intial ‘blurb’ for the tabs can be found on the Bluepages content for website [google doc – need authorisation for viewing]

A very general idea was crated with the Balsamiq Mockups application and the screens created are below:

Homepage mockup

The Homepage had some alterations from the group, the search box on the top will include/assume basic search from People, Department and Projects.
The tab Advanced Search will be renamed to “Search by…” to make it easier and more obvious for the user
The tab How to Contribute will be aggregated to the tab “Add your data”
The main blurb on the page will be shorter, almost like a “punch line” for the Bluepages
Mouse over the Research Activity will open little ‘tooltip’ with more information about what is considered a Research activity (projects, contracts, grants, clinical trials, awards)

Browsing by People mockup

Profile mockup

The source of information is to be moved to the top of the page, to make it obvious where it came from
The reporting missing or incorrect information will have more functions (or more buttons, TBC)
Button “Do you know this person? Ask them to update their profile!”, “Is this you? Claim your profile!”

We have discussed a few features and functions that can be beneficial for the bluepages (atm only ideas and we’ll try to add as much as possible, but not 100% confirmed that all the features below will be on the final bluepages), information came from a list of features from existing systems:

Add your data – simple registration (name, login, email, pwd) then goes for the second step of webauth to add info in the registration form (entering more information on the profile). First “edit” of the information through the web becomes ‘unverified’ until we do a manual verification of the profile.
One line – tweeter style – focus on the question: “What are you working on today?”
Allow owner of profile to attach web photo/avatar
Import colleagues/collaborators – allow user to mark collaborators that are in the Bluepages
Send invitation to colleagues / share this
Allow short / full profile and user to switch visibility of parts of his/hers profile
% of completeness (team to define which items will add to 100%) only shown to the profile owner when is logged in
Rank of contributors – mispelling corrections, etc.
‘Contact this person’ link on profile – this will redirect to the Oxford contact list (link to search that result close matches) or to twitter account if person has one
Possible widgets like Dopplr, Flickr, Facebook, etc.
Faceted search, search by author/add author, all/any of these; refine your search/search again; search order/reorder results
Mouse over for more details on short descriptions/abstracts of publications, for example
Recent activity (searches done) – user can turn on/off and clear (this uses session information, so it will be reviewed in the future)
Subject areas (graph like) on department pages to see their breakdown
Department/group page – possible to send email to the administrator
Atom feed (alerts of changes on the profile, eg: new publications)
List of journals this person has published in (pretty graph? – Scopus style). Example: this person publish 3 articles on X journal, 10 papers in Y journal, 2 articles in Z journal.
Display of documents/books and publications (getting information from libraries and Amazon) – List8d project illustrate that, see the video below:

List8D from Mark Fendley on Vimeo.

Our submission for the Dev8D Developer Decathlon