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 Subversion repository in the license.rdf/license_rdf module.

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. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), strip the protocol information (http://) 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.

Usages

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

• The license engine
• OpenOffice.org add-in
• Liblicense

License Files (.rdf)

Attributes

• cc:license
  • about
  • permits
  • requires
  • prohibits
• dc:title - The human readable name of the license.
• dc:description - Description of the license.
• dc:coverage - The jurisdiction of the license. (country code from ISO3166)
• dc:relation
  • hasVersion - version number
  • isReplacedBy - indicates retired license (URI)
  • isBasedOn - indicates ported version (URI)
• dc:type - always "License"
• dc:creator
• dc:publisher
• dc:identifier - URI of license (URI)