What is the license of the content published on the Land Portal website?
The Land Portal advocates strongly for the use of open licenses to maximize the usability of the information published on the Land Portal.
Considering this, in principle, the information available on the Land Portal website is available under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. This means that users are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
for any purpose, even commercially.
HOWEVER, the structure of the Land Portal allows anyone with an Internet connection to register and create content. The Land Portal cannot guarantee the veracity of the information posted by users. Any given content may have been changed, vandalized or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields. Therefore, before downloading and re-using information published on the Land Portal, please check whether there are no specific copyright restrictions mentioned. Please also note that in the Land Library, in principle only the metadata is available as Open Data, and the actual resource is not. Due to these reasons, the Land Portal Foundation can in no way be held responsible for the content that is contained in these webpages.
What is the license of the Linked Open Data exposed by the Land Portal?
Data available through our Linked Open Data triplestore (currently, Virtuoso) is licensed according to Open Data Commons Attribution License. In a nutshell, this license allows for:
- Sharing: copy, distribute and use the data.
- Creating: produce works based on the data.
- Adapting: modify, transform and build new contents based on the data.
What is the license of the software developed by the Land Portal?
By default, all software developed by the Land Portal is licensed under MIT License. In a nutshell, it is a short and permissive software license that, basically, you can do whatever you want as long as you include the original copyright and license notice in any copy of the software/source.
All the software developed by the Land Portal is available on Land Portal's GitHub repositories.
Why the license is so important?
Without a licence, data is not truly open. Unless you have a licence, data may be ‘publicly available’, but users will not have permission to access, use and share it under copyright or database laws.
By applying licenses to your outputs, you remove any ambiguity over what others can - and can't - do with your work.
If you want to know more about the importance of licensing, there is a lesson called "Why do we need to license?" from the European Data Portal’s eLearning course together with the Open Data Institute, the course "Open Licensing" for helping you to find the best open license for your research outputs (from FOSTER Plus Project) and the FAQ for research data licensing and copyright (from Australian National Data Service (ANDS)).