Framework for policy aware reuse of content on the WWW

Abstract

This thesis focuses on methods for detecting and preventing license violations, in a step towards policy aware content reuse on the Web. This framework builds upon the Creative Commons (CC) Rights Expression Language, which provides a very clear and a widely accepted set of licenses grounded in Semantic Web technologies. These licenses are machine readable, and indicates to a person who wishes to reuse the content exactly how it should be used. An experiment on CC attribution license violations on Flickr images revealed the attribution license violation rate on the Web to be around 70-90% from samples of Websites that had at least one embedded Flickr image. Therefore, it is evident that there should be robust mechanisms for detecting license violations on the Web and prevent those happening, if possible. The primary objective is to enable the user to do the right thing instead of preventing the user from doing the wrong thing. As a solution, we have implemented (1) "Attribution License Violations Validator" for Flickr images and, (2) the more generic "Semantic Clipboard". The "Attribution License Violations Validator" can be used to validate users' work against any attribution license violation. The "Semantic Clipboard", which is implemented as a component of the Tabulator Firefox extension, allows the user to copy an image with its license metadata expressed in Resource Description Framework in annotations (RDFa) in the original source document to any other document.