Licensing: Naming for License properties defined in other standards

[swinslow]

This question follows on from @armintaenzertng's comment at #179 (comment). It relates to the thread at #167 and in particular @goneall's comment at #167 (comment).

The comment property for Licenses is, I believe, one of those with semantics defined in other standards, like you described above. See https://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#comment

Although its name is comment, if I understand correctly I believe that ties to the "Notes" field for licenses on the SPDX License List. I'm not certain that we are actually using the "Notes" field in a manner that ties into the RDF-defined meaning of "A description of the subject resource." Perhaps this should be changed to licenseNotes?

A similar situation applies for seeAlso, which is described as "Other web pages for this license" on the HTML License List pages and with the <crossRef> tags in the license list XML syntax. For this one, our usage on the License List does appear to be in line with the RDF-defined meaning of "Further information about the subject resource", but I note the open question about #167 as to overlapping property names across profiles.

Finally, name for Licenses is perhaps better to change to licenseName to avoid similar conflict issues, though I don't think there's the same question about terms defined in other standards.

@goneall in particular -- do you have thoughts on this? Should we keep comment and seeAlso with the current names in the SPDX 3.0 model in order to maintain the tie to the RDF terms, or would these be appropriate to change to licenseNotes and licenseCrossRefs?

[goneall]

@swinslow You make some very good points. We have tried to (re)use previous standards even when the semantics were close, but not exact. In RDF, there is nice feature we can use which is sub-property.

For the comment property of licenses, it doesn't map exactly to the notes. The comments is related to the license comments in the spec. BTW - there is an issue in the SPDX spec I added in 2017 to document properties of the license list itself. If we were to act on that issue, we could add the notes in as suggested.

For seeAlso, that property pre-dates the introduction of crossRef. We added crossRef for some of the reasons you mentioned.

To move forward on this issue, I suggest we first decide if we're going to include the full list of properties we defined in the listed license (SPDX spec issue 46 above). I believe it should be included in the spec, but it would require some work to define and document.

[goneall]

I went back and looked at the proposed class definitions and there already are several properties that help implement the listed license properties mentioned in SPDX Spec issue 46 referenced above.

The RDF Terms have a relatively complete list of properties used since I use that for the LicenseListPublisher. We could copy some of those term definitions over to the spec.

[swinslow]

Leaving open to reconsider for 3.0 regarding @goneall's comment above, as to whether there are other properties that haven't been included and ought to be. Also to be discussed whether some of the existing properties (e.g. licenseName / additionName) should be removed in favor of the related Core property (e.g. name).

[goneall]

I'll take a pass at comparing the definitions and add properties to match the listed licenses.

I'll add them in at the License class unless it is obvious that it only applies to listed licenses.

[swinslow]

Thanks again @goneall for your earlier comments on this.

Given that there hasn't been input from others, and that I haven't seen any concerns about the existing property names following -rc2, I'm going to go ahead and close this as "won't fix". If others come back with concerns about this down the road, we can perhaps revisit, but it doesn't sound like there's a need or desire to change things here for 3.0.