Interesting discussion – and one that’s long overdue! As it sounds like you’re interested in taking this discussion to the people who can actually make changes, I’d like to draw your attention to a mini-rant I wrote:

http://bre.klaki.net/dagbok/faerslur/1209130588.shtml (sorry, Icelandic)

No surprises there, probably, but it gives (IMHO) a very clear example of how limited access to government data is tangibly preventing innovation.

I’m pretty sure that if it is decently presented, we can change that. There may be some gray areas or nuances, but the big picture is pretty straight forward once you start thinking about.

28481k: I’m pretty convinced that we can bring about a policy about open access to public sector data. All in all I would like to keep the conversation on the high level and not about the BÍN dataset as such, even though it was what sparked the discussion.

Iceland Copyrights Law on WIPO

Hjalli, do you think something can be done to open the information?

Francis’ comments on the (enviable) state of affairs in Norway are nicely complemented by Hjalli’s earlier blog post about efforts in the UK to bring open access to British government data. And, isn’t the US far ahead in this, too?

A similar effort is still very much at the grassroots level here in Iceland, and it is important to understand who the players are – policies are set at the ministerial level, within the confines of copyright law as it stands, not by individual researchers or even research institutions. If we want more open data access we need to clarify the resulting benefits for *everyone* – business, academia and the general public alike.

Otherwise we’re just stuck with the current situation of copyright disbelievers who own very little data and are happy to share it, vs. copyright true believers who own most or all of the data but see little apparent benefit in a more open environment.

I’m convinced that the owners of the data stand to gain more than anyone else from opening their data sets, just like the British and the Norwegians seem to have concluded. But, exactly what are those benefits? The crux of the matter is showing that the pros outweigh the cons.

Incidentally… AFAIK the maintainers of the BÍN data set are forced to react to patterns such as those evidenced in the BÍN and Wikipedia logs, there is no choice in the matter. They’re charged with this as a part of their job descriptions and would be delinquent if they did not react. In fact, Hjalli had no choice in the matter either – he could have dragged his feet, but only somewhat pointlessly. Eventually a letter from the lawyers at the Ministry of Education would have forced the issue.

You can read the background of BÍN on the BÍN website (in Icelandic).

The Ministry of Education paid for the making of the BÍN database. This was a part of a special effort on language technology back in 2002. As such, the Ministry was the rightholder. In an agreement with the Icelandic Dictionary (now a part of Árnastofnun institute) in 2005, the institute became the rightholder. This agreement is what defines the access to the data. As I’ve understood, a part of that is what led to the current licensing model for BÍN.

Francis: Thanks for the pointers. Very interesting. The Norwegians seem much more forward looking than e.g. the Danish model which I think the Icelandic one was based on. But as said before there are usually more complications behind all of these than meet the eye at first.

I sent you an email earlier, this isn’t quite related to that, but it is to the current conversation tangentially. It is interesting to see how the Norwegian government deals with this. Both the Norsk Ordbank (full formed inflection lists — something like BÍN) for Nynorsk and Bokmål are available under the GPL:

http://www.edd.uio.no/prosjekt/ordbanken/

As is the Oslo-Bergen POS tagger based on Constraint Grammar:

http://omilia.uio.no/obt/lisens.html

This is a much more desirable state of affairs for language technology, and while Norwegian isn’t an exemplar, it is certainly more along the rode than Icelandic and doing very well considering the size.

~Fran

Could you elaborate on the relevant Ministry of Education regulations which you refer to above?