SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

(c) free copies or privileged accesses: data users must inform data owners of free copies
or privileged accesses to servers.
4.2 Developing ‘standard geolicences’
The elaboration of this matrix is the background for the development of ‘standardised
geolicences’ and ‘Guidelines on the use of geographic information’. It represents the
conceptual model useful to implement digital rights management capabilities for geographic
applications. Enforcing the GeoRM application, the holder of intellectual property
rights (information owner) agrees to provide specific permission (use rights) to
identified parties (users), under various constraints. Thanks to the definition of these
use cases, a first draft of the licence was drawn up in this second research phase. The
draft licence will be used in the near future to compile automatically electronic geolicences
for information distribution, considering specific restrictions and requirements
that information owner, in this case Piedmont Region but also the other regional public
administrations, establishes for its information.
Geolicence defines terms and conditions for the end user which acquires a set of rights
(permitted uses, display, download, format, distribution) under specific constraints. The
licensor and the licensee play primary roles: information owner (Piedmont Region) as a
licensor, defines policies to be applied when information and services are distributed
among the stakeholders and the end user, as a licensee, accesses geographic information
under specific terms and conditions (OGC, 2007). Successful negotiations create
standardised geolicences, expressed through two forms:
1. legal code: representing a legal expression of terms and conditions of the licence;
2. user friendly: a simplified, readable version for the web, expressing terms and conditions.
The implementation phase, starting from now on, will enable end users to access or
download licenced geographic information under specific terms and conditions, electronically
composed by a web form in a ‘click geolicence’. This is a common form of
agreement, mostly found on the web, as part of information download. Click licence
contents and forms vary widely, but the main activity requires end users to subscribe to
the licence or not by clicking an ‘agree button’ in a dialog box. Piedmont Region’s geographic
information will be disseminated using a click geolicence system, in which end
users will enter the regional Spatial Data Infrastructure, will search information using a
metadata catalogue and obtain selected geographic information, after subscribing to a
geolicence agreement. The result may permit display or download.
The web form of Piedmont click licences, now in a draft version, is composed of three
sections:
1. user information: this part refers to user information such as name, surname, email,
phone number, user type class, fiscal code number, etc;
2. use categories: this section contains selected use categories (commercial or non -
commercial);
3. access conditions: what licensee ‘can do’, after obtaining licenced resources.
Click licence is a user friendly form: the end user will receive also a ‘legal code’ by email.
In the section use categories and access conditions, the licensee can select only
the permitted use, previously defined via the matrix ‘data/use categories/access’, whilst
other unauthorised uses are frozen.
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