License RDF

Creative Commons provides information on licenses for three audiences: lawyers, humans and machines. The machine-readable information is described using RDF and made available from the creativecommons/cc.licenserdf git repository.

File Naming

Files in the license_rdf module are named using the following convention:

creativecommons.org_license_[license-code]_[version]_[jurisdiction]_.rdf

More generally, you can take the URL of a license (i.e. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), strip the protocol information (https://) and replace all forward-slashes (/) with underscores (_) to arrive at the base filename. Liblicense provides a function to perform this mapping for you.

File Contents

Each file contains the RDF (encoded as RDF/XML) describing the particular license. Information described by the RDF includes:

• license name, including translations
• license description, including translations
• license properties, as described by ccREL

Usages

The license RDF files are used in the following CC applications:

• The license engine
• OpenOfficeOrg Addin
• Liblicense
• IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework)