Internet Alchemy

Via boing boing comes this impressive design for a library built out of decommissioned aircraft fuselages:

Over 200 Boeing 727 and 737 fuselages are stacked in a north-south slant in relation to sun exposure for energy efficiency. Two shifts in the direction of the main axis of the fuselages generate two large open spaces within the stack.

The building utilizes the space inside the fuselages to contain and organize functions that require enclosed spaces - such as book collections, meeting rooms and administration offices, - while the 2 large open spaces house a large atrium with all the reading areas on one side and two auditoriums on the other.

The library program is centered around the large glazed atrium, which develops vertically through the entire cross section of the building. The lower part of the atrium, located on the second level and accessible directly from the new plaza thru escalators and elevators, functions as a lobby and information center. At each upper level, the reading areas bridge between the two opposite interior facades generated by the cross sections of the fuselages that look onto the atrium.

More information

Today I published the first public draft of the Talis Community Licence which is going to play a key role in our technology platform. It gives users and contributors of all kinds of platform data some fundamental rights with one important restriction. Basically it…

• Grants the freedom to use the data for any purpose
• Grants the freedom to modify and mix the data
• Grants the freedom to redistribute copies
• Prevents any attempt to deny those freedoms to others

We’re expecting the Talis platform to manage and make available under this licence a huge variety of data ranging from MARC to RDF and everything in-between - that’s 4 decades of data formats!

The licence has its roots in the GPL and includes the same sort of redistribution clauses. So, for example, if you wanted to use any of the data from the Talis platform in your application then you are free to do so. If you want to make that data available to the public then that counts as redistribution and you must licence the output under the Talis Community Licence. Our goal here is not only to preserve the initial pool of freely available data but to expand it by encouraging more and more data to be licenced in the same way. You’re free to sell the data from the platform for any amount, perhaps to cover distribution costs, but you must still issue it under the licence which means that someone who pays your fee can take the data and give it away to others.

Our licence is one of the first to be based on database right rather than copyright. In most countries in the world you cannot assert copyright over facts held in a database but can copyright the database structure and then apply Creative Commons goodness to it. Database right is a different right supported by many countries that enables curators of databases to assert some protection over its entirity. Our licence takes advantage of that to preserve access to data forever.

We don’t want this to remain solely a Talis initiative and we have a small community of experts in this area that we have been consulting with. We’re looking to work with anyone who has similar goals to us in this area and wants to expand this type of licence to cover data from across the spectrum.

I’m expecting this licence to provoke a lot of discussion since it’s new and different from other types of licencing and I think it has huge ramifications for the way data is shared and made available in the long term. The best place to discuss and ask questions is over at the Talis Developer Network. Hope to see you there.

I’m upgrading to WordPress 2.0.2 so there will be some disruption especially since I’m also moving my blog from internetalchemy.org to iandavis.com/blog. Please update your bookmarks if you can.

update: having trouble restoring the tag functionality at the moment.

I’ve seen a few comments on the XMLHttpRequest working draft that we published along the lines of “Microsoft not invited” which are quite surprising to me. Perhaps the people writing these posts aren’t familiar with the W3C process which allows any member organisation to join any working group at any time. Everyone has paid for the right to join and the announcement of new groups is made very clearly. Microsoft are a very active member of the W3C and participate in lots of groups. Why aren’t they in this one? I don’t know, but there are often many reasons why members don’t participate from the start such including being too busy or just not seeing it as a priority. The W3C patent policy can also cause problems for members who sometimes need to go through all kinds of legal wranglings to sign up to its terms. It could be any or none of those reasons, but saying they weren’t invited is just plain wrong.

I went to see Placebo play at the Birmingham Academy on Sunday night which gave me the chance to play with our new camera:

It was a good show, although not as good as some others on this tour according to opinion in the discussion forums. They played almost all of the new album and some older stuff, although they seemed to avoid anything from the previous album. This is the third time we’ve seen them in two years so we’re getting to be regulars Hopefully they’ll do a return leg in the autumn and it’d be great to see them at Brixton this time - a better venue and one of their favourites apparently.