Licenses Compatibility and Composition in the Web of Data

The absence of clarity concerning the licensing terms does not encourage the reuse of the data by the consumers, thus preventing further publication and consumption of datasets, at the expense of the growth of the Web of Data itself. In this paper, we propose a general framework to attach the licensing terms to the data queried on the Web of Data. In particular, our framework addresses the following issues: (i) the various license schemas are collected and aligned taking as reference the Creative Commons schema, (ii) the compatibility of the licensing terms concerning the data affected by the query is verified, and (iii) if compatible, the licenses are combined into a composite license. The framework returns the composite license as licensing term about the data resulting from the query.