Developer Aids and Libraries

License metadata validation web service

Creative Commons offers web services for integrating license selection into applications, and we have a License Metadata Validator. How about mashing the two of them up? A web service which allowed applications to validate license metadata would allow applications to integrate another aspect of CC licensing with minimal effort. See the page License metadata validation web service

CC Web Service Wrappers

We currently offer language-specific wrappers for the Creative Commons Web Services in Python, Java and PHP. Help make it easier for other developers to integrate license selection by writing a wrapper library in your language of choice. Lisp, anyone?

A successful implementation will include a small driver application which demonstrates how the wrapper can be used for license selection. See Web Services Client Implementations for information on our existing implementations. Please see the page CC Web Service Wrappers

APIs for Creative Commons license metadata

We provide RDF metadata for each our our licenses and the public domain dedication. Many developers will find it easiest to access this metadata via a programming language-specifc API. cclicense.php is an example of such an API for PHP web developers. Ada, C++, E, Java, Lisp, ML, Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk, Tcl (and many more!) are all up for grabs. Your wrapper should also include a small driver program to demonstrate how it can be used to pull license information. Bonus points if your implementation can dynamically discover and wrap new licenses using the Creative Commons metadata vocabulary. Please see APIs for Creative Commons license metadata.

License metadata in XML formats

• Please help write this summary :)

Implementations

• Please add your implementation here :)

License metadata in SMIL and SVG

SMIL (multimedia playlists) includes support for RDF/XML metadata. We need examples of including license metadata in SMIL for the purposes of denoting that a SMIL playlist itself is published under a Creative Commons license or that individual components of the playlist are licensed. Even better if you can use dc:source to specify parent playlists/works. (SVG has similar support for RDF/XML metadata.) Read more about the motivation in this cc-metadata post.

Implementations

• Lucas Gonze has created a CreativeCommons SMIL Module
• Inkscape includes support for SVG metadata.
• SVG::Metadata by Bryce Harrington is a PERL module for including metadata inside an SVG (used by Open Clip Art Library.

TODO

• generalize to all xml formats, split into separate challenges

Companion File metadata specification

It is impractical to embed metadata in some file formats, so we need a specification for a "companion" metadata file that would define license and other metadata information. Please see Companion File metadata specification.

Operating System Support For Creative Commons Metadata

Recent and upcoming operating systems will have built-in support for application-level metadata. See Gnome, Vista, and Tiger. How can Creative Commons take advantage of these technologies to enable CC-aware search and applications on the next generation desktop? Wanted: research briefs on how to expose CC license info for objects in each major OS or framework. Support for the external metadata files should be included.

Implementations

• Please add your implementation here :)