3. Licenses and TOS for the Open Data Hub material¶

The resources that are part of the Open Data Hub Project are subject to different licenses, which are described in section Licenses for Open Data Hub resources. Derivative material built using Open Data Hub material is also subjected to different licenses, depending on its purpose, as shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1 Licenses for the Open Data Hub and derivative material.¶

The FLOSS four freedoms¶

The four essential freedoms are the four basic principle to which a software program must comply to be defined free software. As stated on the What is free software? web page (on which you can find a lot more information and details), they are:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Licenses for Open Data Hub resources¶

The Open Data Hub Project processes dataset, possibly supplied by third-party sources (i.e., Data Providers), which may contain closed data; however, only Open Data are returned to the users’ queries.

According to the main goal of the Open Data Hub Project, we have defined licenses for its different components and we use badges across the documentation for a better visibility. As a rule of thumb, we try to do our best to deliver Open Data, by developing Free/Open Source software that is publicly available on github, and by using an Open Standard for the API used to access data.

These licenses are applied to the Open Data Hub components:

All the software released within the Open Data Hub is Free software and complies with the GPLv3 license. Code repositories can be found at https://github.com/noi-techpark.
The Datasets currently expose only Open Data that are in the public domain, so they are released as CC0.
The APIs have no license yet, since we are in the process to define which among the CC licenses could fit best. See Figure 3.2 for an overview and quick description of CC licenses and derivative material.

CC0 Licensed Data¶

Open Data Hub provides a live updated table about the number of CC0 licensed data it contains. Please note, this data is calculated on some datasets and does not consider all datasets of the whole Open Data Hub yet.

https://databrowser.opendatahub.com/Home/LicenseStatus

Note

There is an additional clarification about the licence for any content that is retrieved from the datasets in JSON format, which is detailed in Section License of the JSON Responses.

Figure 3.2 Creative Common Licenses and derivative material.¶

License of the JSON Responses¶

Whenever you query the data in the Open Data Hub, the snippet that you retrieve always includes a block of information called LicenseInfo, similar to the following one:

{
   "LicenseInfo": {
     "Author": "",
       "License": "CC0",
       "ClosedData": false,
       "LicenseHolder": "https://www.lts.it"
   }
}

The highlighted line shows a licence, which in this case is CC0, i.e., public domain and therefore freely reusable.

This block is always included as a child node within a JSON record that starts with an ID and a number of additional information, which may include also hyperlinks to resources that are external to the Open Data Hub, like in the following snippet–shortened for the sake of simplicity, which refers to a webcam and contains a link to an external provider where to find actual resources (e.g., streams and images) from that webcam.

{
  "Id": "D3659E1F111C4CDB2EC19F8FC95118B7",
  "Active": true,
  "Streamurl": null,
  "Webcamurl": "https://webtv.feratel.com/webtv/?&pg=5EB12424-7C2D-428A-BEFF-0C9140CD772F&design=v3&cam=6323&c1=0",
  "LicenseInfo": {
    "Author": "",
    "License": "CC0",
    "ClosedData": false,
    "LicenseHolder": "https://www.lts.it"
  }
}

Whenever hyperlinks like the one shown in line 5 above appear, it must not be implied that the license mentioned in the LicenseInfo block (again, CC0) is applied to them: everything contained in that link may be covered by a different licence.

Indeed, the Licence mentioned in LicenseInfo nodes refer only to content of the parent node–i.e., the one that starts with “Id”, not to the content of any of the other children nodes, including Streamurl and Webcamurl.

APIs Terms of Service¶

The Open Data Hub project is already used in production for NOI internal projects, and in particular it is the data hub used by the South Tyrolean tourism portal, https://www.suedtirol.info/en/.

The public API are in early development and therefore should be still considered as a beta version. If any third party would like to use a stable version of the APIs in its production environment, a special agreement must be signed with NOI techpark. You can contact for any information.