Glossary

The Creative Commons world includes many buzzwords -- legal, social, and technical. Here's a quick guide to some of them, with links for more on each.

CC+

A protocol describing the offering of a work under a CC license plus other options, such as the availability of private agreements that provide permissions or warranties beyond the scope of the CC license on offer. Note that one cannot add restrictions to a CC license via this or any other mechanism.

[ccLearn http://learn.creativecommons.org]

A division of Creative Commons that works to minimize legal, technical and social barriers to reuse of educational materials.

ccREL

Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, a composite recommendation of technologies for marking digital media with license information and other metadata.

liblicense

A software library in the C programming language that makes functions such as reading and embedding license metadata and discovering license properties available to other programs.

OA

Open Access

OER

Open Educational Resource

RDF

Resource Description Framework, a model for representing statements about things on the web.

RDFa

RDF in attributes, a mechanism for annotating web pages such that machine-readable data is colocated with human-visible markup, allowing metadata to be retained through operations like copy and paste. The key recommendation of ccREL.

Science Commons

A division of Creative Commons that applies open tools to the problem of unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing.

XMP

eXtensible Metadata Protocol, a format for embedding metadata in many different file formats, most significantly PDF and JPEG. A recommendation of ccREL.