Open Future FoundationThe first part of CommonsDB Feasibility Study—by @paulk, @CultureDoug, @Posth, @jpquintais, Kacper Szkalej, and Thomas Margon—anticipates launching the first public version of the registry after summer.
Albin Larsson@openfuture I'm curious about how CommonsDB can avoid amplifying incorrect rights statements given it's a big problem with today's aggregators and other cross institutional repositories.
The study brings up that CommonsDB wouldn't be liable in such cases, but what about the potential harm to reusers?
Paul Keller@abbe98 @openfuture @CultureDoug @Posth @jpquintais
that is a big part of what we are trying to do. We are developing a trust model where we will only accept declarations from organizations whose rights management practices we trust to be accurate. in addition by allowing to have rights information from different sources we will also be able to highlight cases where rights statements differ (and this may be incorrect). we are very aware of the quality issues and this is an attempt to fix them.
Nemo_bis 🌈@paulk So it's an all or nothing approach for each org? Does the gatekeeping happen when orgs ask for "verifiable credentials"? Is this going to be similar to the process for inclusion in Europeana, where orgs applied for inclusion and the staff spot checked records and helped orgs improve their metadata? What error rate will be considered acceptable? How to help orgs gradually clean up/improve their metadata other than with a binary threat of exclusion?
@nemobis @abbe98 @openfuture @CultureDoug @Posth @jpquintais
all very good questions that we will answer during the next few months. But I do not think there will be "threat of exclusion" since this is a voluntary registry we do not think of quality control as exclusion. We would also expect that the fact hat data providers have to sign their declarations (i.e attest to their accuracy) will make this only attractive for orgs that have a high degree of confidence in tehir rights information
@paulk OK. So no orgs from Italy for example. :)
@nemobis depends on how the approach rights determinations. One of the ideas behind the design is that when it comes to digital files users will be able to obtain rights information for different sources. A hypothetical uses case:
@nemobis A user sees an image in a website of institution A where it says that the image is © of that organisation, but has reasons to believe that this is inaccurate. They can then check on commonsDB if there is rights information known in our system and my discover that they image is also available on WM commons where it is accurately labeled as being in the Public Domain.
@paulk I see. The best outcome would be that public institutions can incorporate corrections from #WikimediaCommons. This would finally allow us to close the loop from content partnerships, where often most of the metadata cleanup and enrichment happens in Commons because the source systems are too unwieldy.
Still, it sounds like we won't have anything from Italy unless it's first imported to Commons.