Defining a Machine-Readable Friendly License for Cloud Contribution Environments

Abstract:  There are two types of Contribution environments that have been widely written about in the last decade – closed environments controlled by the promulgator and open access environments seemingly controlled by everyone and no-one at the same time. In closed environments, the promulgator has the sole discretion to control both the intellectual property at hand and the integrity of that content. In open access environments the Intellectual Property (IP) is controlled to varying degrees by the Creative Commons License associated with the content. It is solely up to the promulgator to control the integrity of that content. Added to that, open access environments don’t offer native protection to data in such a way that the data can be access and utilized for Text Mining (TM), Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Machine Learning (ML). It is our intent in this paper to lay out a third option – that of a federated cloud environment wherein all members of the federation agree upon terms for copyright protection, the integrity of the data at hand, and the use of that data for Text Mining (TM), Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Machine Learning (ML).