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Joint OOR-Ontolog-NCBO-CC-IAOA-OASIS "OpenOntologyRepository_IPR Policy and Issues" Panel Discussion (session-2) - Thu 16-Sep-2010

  • Topic: "OOR-IPR session 2: what are the IPR issues relating to open ontology repositories (and ontologies in general)?"
  • Chair: Professor MarkMusen (NCBO; Stanford) - [ slides ]
  • Panelists:
    • Mr. CameronRoss (Kojeware; OOR) - "Ecosystems, Ontology Repositories, and IPR" - [ slides ]
    • Professor AlanRector (University of Manchester) - Remarks: "The GALEN and SNOMED IPR experience" - [ abstract ]
    • Dr. JohnSowa (Vivomind Intelligence; SIO) - Remarks: "Issues with Patents" - [ slides ]
    • Mr. BrucePerens (original author of the "Open Source Definition") - Commentary
    • Mr. JohnWilbanks (VP of Science, Creative Commons) - Commentary
    • Mr. PeterYim (Co-convener, Ontolog & OOR; Secretary, IAOA) - "Questions to ALL: what are our issues now?" - [ slides ]

Conference Call Details

  • Date: Thursday, 16-September-2010
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Attendees

Resources

Agenda & Proceedings

Panel Discussion Session: "OOR-IPR session 2: what are the IPR issues relating to open ontology repositories (and ontologies in general)?"

  • Session Format & Agenda: this is a virtual session conducted over an augmented conference call:
    • 1. Opening - chair ... [ slides ]
    • 2. Panelists Briefings - Cameron Ross, Alan Rector, John F. Sowa ... (15 min. each)
    • 3. Reactions from our session-1 IPR experts - Bruce Perens, John Wilbanks ... (5 min. each)
    • 4. Q & A and open discussion - All (30 min.) ... please refer to [ process above]
      • 4.1 within this segment, we will try to capture ontology-repository-related IPR issues that have been bothering our participants as well (please come prepared with your input!) - moderated by Peter P. Yim
    • 5. Conclusion / Follow-up - co-chairs

Abstracts

  • Session Topic: "OOR-IPR session 2: what are the IPR issues relating to open ontology repositories (and ontologies in general)?"
This "OOR-IPR mini-series" will, hopefully, start a dialog among the global ontology community, to specifically address IPR issues relating to the "open ontology repository (OOR)" initiative. The discussion will, invariably, touch upon IPR issues pertaining to ontology in general as well.
This mini-series is jointly organized by the OOR initiative, the Ontolog-community, NCBO (US National Center for Biomedical Ontology), CC (Creative Commons), IAOA (the International Association for Ontology and its Applications) and OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards).
Given the complexity of the issues involved, one can look as this mini-series to merely be the beginning of a quest, by the collaborating parties and their communities, to fully understand the issues, and to get themselves into a position to address them.
In this 2nd session, we will try to find out what, really, are the IPR issues relating to open ontology repositories in particular, and to ontologies, or even the science and technology of Ontology, in general. We will attempt to enumerate the pertinent issues and try to mitigate or address them one-by-one, if we can.
Please refer also to the background and thoughts collected during the process of organizing this mini-series, at: OpenOntologyRepository_IPR
Check out the full proceedings of the Launch Session of this OOR-IPR mini-series - ConferenceCall_2010_09_09

Panel Members Briefings

  • Title: "Ecosystems, Ontology Repositories, and IPR" - [ slides ]
    • by Cameron Ross
    • Abstract: ... This presentation will summarize some of the objectives, assumptions and issues that motivate this series of sessions on IPR. A brief explanation of how the OOR fits in to a larger ecosystem for semantic applications will also be presented, along with a recommendation to give IP provenance due consideration within the OOR initiative.
  • Title: "The GALEN and SNOMED IPR experience"
    • by Alan Rector
    • Abstract: ... We have two experiences to share:
i) GALEN, which was a large collaborative development in the 1990s. In that development, all attempts to determine shares of intellectual property proved both expensive and futile. It was eventually made open source as the only practical solution.
ii) The continuing saga with SNOMED, which is currently "half open" and supported by different governments joining the parent organisation. However the lack of a completely open license continues to be a major issue and cost of dealing with SNOMED. For example, the WHO and the SNOMED organisation have taken at least two years and untold legal and executive time to reach an agreement.
IP is intimately related to funding models.
Both GALEN and SNOMED's experience point to the difficulty of achieving a revenue stream for ontologies meant to enable interoperability without strong legal backing, at least in health care. The only organisations that do so as far as I know are those that are backed by some form of mandate - CPT for clinical procedures in the US, ICD-CM in the US (to a lesser degree), ( I don't know how MEDDRA is funded - the reporting standard for adverse drug reactions).
Closed IP does not work well, but alternatives are difficult to point to.

Transcript of the online chat during the session

see raw transcript here.

(for better clarity, the version below is a re-organized and lightly edited chat-transcript.)

Participants are welcome to make light edits to their own contributions as they see fit.

-- begin of chat session --

Peter P. Yim: .

Welcome to the Joint OOR-Ontolog-NCBO-CC-IAOA-OASIS "OpenOntologyRepository_IPR Policy and Issues"

Panel Discussion (session-2) - Thu 16-Sep-2010

  • Topic: "OOR-IPR session 2: what are the IPR issues relating to open ontology repositories (and ontologies in general)?"
  • Chair: Professor Mark Musen (NCBO; Stanford)
  • Panelists: (2HFZ)

o Mr. Cameron Ross (Kojeware; OOR) - "Ecosystems, Ontology Repositories, and IPR"

o Professor Alan Rector (University of Manchester) - Remarks: "The GALEN and SNOMED IPR experience"

o Dr. John F. Sowa (Vivomind Intelligence; SIO) - Remarks: "Issues with Patents"

o Mr. Bruce Perens (original author of the "Open Source Definition") - Commentary

o Mr. John Wilbanks (VP of Science, Creative Commons) - Commentary

o Mr. Peter P. Yim (Co-convener, Ontolog & OOR; Secretary, IAOA) - "Questions to ALL: what are our issues now?"

see details on session page at: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2010_09_16

.

anonymous morphed into Terry Longstreth

John Wilbanks: Peter P. Yim, I am on the line but muted

John Wilbanks: in a noisy environment

Peter P. Yim: Hi John

anonymous morphed into Alan Rector

Ali Hashemi: Hello all!

Yuriy Milov: Hi All

John Wilbanks: Peter P. Yim, can you speak up or increase your mic volume?

Ravi Sharma: @Cameron: why should OOR Support proprietary extensions? as mentioned in your slide.

Cameron Ross: @RaviSharma - Proprietary extension allow commercial entities to utilize the OOR.

Bruce Perens: Bruce Perens is on the line.

Peter P. Yim: great ... Hi Bruce

Ravi Sharma: @Cameron: i view the OOR as a container, kindly compare the keystone unix Kernel with

technologies involved in creating and supporting OOR lifecycle, I also envisage OOR lifecycle to

have ecosystem like evolution where some technologies and ontologies will not be able to survive?

Cameron Ross: @RaviSharma - OOR being a compilation of the OOR content, the software used to

implement the OOR and the federation of specific OOR instances. The tools for creating and

supporting the OOR life-cycle help to define the content... the keystone would result from the uses

of this content. Imagine that the OOR grows in terms of content and we have all kinds of

applications that build on top of it (define applications in a very general sense here). Now, take

away the OOR... ouch!

Ravi Sharma: @Cameron: excellent ELP

Alan Rector: One moment please - moving the microphone nearer I got cut off

Ali Hashemi: Are there slides online?

Peter P. Yim: @Ali - no slides for Alan's remarks

John Wilbanks: this point is essential - the need to clarify and edit ontologies, not just refer to

them

John Wilbanks: here's an old example from 2007 -

http://neurocommons.org/page/2007_prototype_queries#Creating_class_level_relations_for_easier_queryi

ng_of_the_GO.

John Wilbanks: or here: http://neurocommons.org/page/Bundles/obo/all

John Wilbanks: "The part_of relation in all OBO ontologies (and elsewhere in the RDF distribution) is

normalized to http://purl.org/obo/owl/OBO_REL#part_of before being included in the Neurocommons RDF

distribution."

Cameron Ross: @Alan - Contributions to Eclipse are also "viral" in the sense that you must contribute

to the project under the Eclipse Public License. The primary difference, I believe, is that the EPL

is open whereas the contribution to SNOMED is not.

Frank Olken: Hi

Bruce Perens: I would like to speak about challenging the patent.

Ravi Sharma: @Dr. John Sowa - for obvious reasons given by you - Can such a patent be made to be

rescinded or there is too much process involved?

Ravi Sharma: @Bruce and John: can we request patent office to open their process in this particular

case to determine if SMEs who understand Text Processing, Ontology, concepts were consulted or can

now be inducted to review?

John Wilbanks: +1 for public patent foundation

Frank Olken: Public Patent Foundation web site: http://www.pubpat.org/

Peter P. Yim: @Bruce - would you please type out the name and contact for Dan R so we can be sure we got

his name right, please

John Wilbanks: http://www.pubpat.org/

Bruce Perens: Daniel Ravisher at pubpat.org

Frank Olken: PUBPAT Board of Directors - Daniel B. Ravicher, President and Executive Director

John Wilbanks: email is dan at pubpat dot org

John F. Sowa: I suggest that Peter starts a wiki page (each) to collect prior art that is pertinent to

the two example problematic patent/patent-application

Peter P. Yim: will do ... thank you for the suggestion, John

Peter P. Yim: @JohnSowa and All - I have initialized the wiki pages (to collect prior art for your two

artifacts) ... see under: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2010_09_16#nid2HIH

Ravi Sharma: @All- can we also sign a petition from community for patent office.

Ravi Sharma: @ALL- I would like to know opinion in this group whether Ontology as a concept should

not be communicated by us to be non-patentable as it is based on reasoning - (foundation of free

thinking and use of intellect), common knowledge from centuries, and connectedness to knowledge some

prior and some current that is inherently difficult to parse and separate.

John Wilbanks: http://www.patent-commons.org/

Ravi Sharma: @JohnWilbanks - on the referred site above there is no entry for other-patents search

for Ontology?

Cameron Ross: So I guess ignorance is bliss!

Cameron Ross: @JohnWilbanks - Could you elaborate a bit on ontology interoperability v.s. openness?

Cameron Ross: @JohnWilbanks - Got it. Thanks.

Ravi Sharma: IS the question valid - whether ontologies are patentable?

Cameron Ross: @BrucePerens - What are your thoughts on the EPL 1.0?

Cameron Ross: EPL = Eclipse Public Lincese

John Wilbanks: there is also the issue of US *public funding* for vast amounts of ontology work...

Bruce Perens: Freedom of thinking went out with the recent court decision in Vernor v. Autodesk. The

publisher can now license the WAY you use the information, as Sun has tried to do for a decade with

the Java reference books.

John Wilbanks: <ducks>

Cameron Ross: not funded = not sustainable

Peter P. Yim: refer to PeterYim's slides #5 to #12 on "Questions to All participants"

Peter P. Yim: #6: Are you planning to contribute to the OOR effort; if yes, what would your

contribution(s) be?

John Wilbanks: CC is on board

John Wilbanks: we can bring our own research to the table

Ali Hashemi: 1) Yes (mainly COLORE). 2) Software/services(?)[requires other resources to be better

developed] - more so things that work with ontologies than ontologies themselves

Cameron Ross: Maybe, contributing mostly code and infrastructure, but the degree of my contribution

will be dictated by the level of commitment of others and also on the licensing model(s) that is

eventually adopted.

Peter P. Yim: #7: If you are contributing code, what would be your (top 2 or 3) open license

preferences?

Bruce Perens: Bruce says GPL, BSD, LGPL together provide all the common sorts of Open Source license

and are compatible with each other.

Ravi Sharma: @All - since there is no kernel agreed for ontologies or for OOR, unix parallels may not

be directly applicable?

Cameron Ross: License preferences: in order of preferences for OOR code: #1: EPL, #2: BSD, #3 some

other gifting license. Not acceptable from my perspective would be GPL.

Ravi Sharma: general open license

Peter P. Yim: @Ravi - not sure what license you are referring to in the above statement.

Peter P. Yim: #8: If you are contributing content, what would be your (top 2 or 3) open license

preferences?

Cameron Ross: Content license preference at this point would be CC-by 3.0, but this isn't all that

clear to me at this point.

Bruce Perens: BSD, or just declare it to be in the public domain if you don't care about attribution.

Pat Cassidy1: For ontology content, I suggest that the freest possible license be used; if not

public domain, then a gift license with at most an attribution requirement. If control of the name

of an ontology is desirable, I would suggest that the name be trademarked.

Peter P. Yim: #9; If you are planning to run an ontology repository ... Will you federate with the

open instance of the OOR? ... What kind of software license do you plan to adopt? ... What kind of

content license do you plan to adopt?

Cameron Ross: Yes! Absolutely! As long as the OOR interfaces were reasonable to interface with.

Current plan is to use EPL 1.0 for software and CC-by 3.0.

Peter P. Yim: #10: Should we, as a community, take a position on Software patents? if so, what

position should we take?

Ravi Sharma: consensus communique

Bruce Perens: Unfortunately software patenting is potentially a show-stopper for Open Source, so you

need to do something about it. The W3C process is probably good.

Peter P. Yim: #11: Should we, as a community, take a position on Ontology patents? if so, what

position should we take?

Ravi Sharma: Peter your Q lists what i wanted to communicate anyway. Thanks.

Ravi Sharma: Can we attempt a communique style brief as consensus of community in the next 2-3 wks?

Ravi Sharma: Ontologies should not be patentable, but some effort attribution ought to be allowed.

Cameron Ross: I don't think that ontologies should be patentable, but I see the whole patent

situation to be entirely misguided.

Cameron Ross: I guess we should take a position, but I wouldn't dedicate a lot of resources to it...

its seems like a black hole... I think that our resources would be better spent just doing real

work.

Peter P. Yim: #12: Any suggestion on how we can get open efforts funded ... ?

Bruce Perens: Write grants?

Ali Hashemi: Re funding: case studies demonstrating real $ savings for companies?

Ali Hashemi: i.e. form a committee or a group via ontolog to demonstrate a business case for open

efforts in ontologies?

Ali Hashemi: (dunno if this is pie in the sky...)

Ali Hashemi: case can/should also be made to government organizations. Electronic health records,

etc... The case just needs to be documented and made.

Bruce Perens: Someone's going to have to tilt at this windmill some day.

Ravi Sharma: Peter: Will some of the answers in chat find their way on the active pages?

Peter P. Yim: @Ravi - the chat transcript will be captured onto the session page shortly (as usual)

Ravi Sharma: Thanks.

Bruce Perens: Bye.

Cameron Ross: Thanks everyone.

Peter P. Yim: thanks

Peter P. Yim: -- session ended 12:27pm PDT --

-- end of chat session --

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  • Conference Date and Time: 16-Sep-2010 10:39am ~ 12:27pm PDT
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