License Properties
In addition to the human readable license deeds and legal code, Creative Commons provides machine readable metadata for licenses. This page describes how to start with a license URI and map it to license attributes.
Attributes Overview
License Attributes fall into one of three classes: permissions, prohibitions and requirements. Permissions declare a permission given by the license, above and beyond what default copyright law allows. Prohibitions prohibit a particular use of the work, specifically affecting the scope of the permissions provided by a permission. Requirements describe actions required of user when making use of the permissions.
A list of permissions, prohibitions and requirements defined by Creative Commons is available at http://creativecommons.org/ns.
Using RDFa
RDFa is an editor's draft at W3 which describes a way to serialize [RDF] triples in HTML. Creative Commons includes the appropriate RDFa When selecting a license from http://creativecommons.org/license to indicate that a page is licensed. For example:
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="license">Attribution 3.0</a>
The rel="license" attribute indicates that the link specified (the license URL in this case) has special semantic meaning.
With the license URI, an RDFa parser may be used to extract license attributes from the human readable deed.
