A License-Based Search Engine

Abstract : The reuse of licensed resources to produce new ones is very common and encouraged on the Web. But producing resources whose licenses are compliant with all reused resource licenses is not easy. It is necessary to know (1) the set of licenses with which the license of the produced resource is compliant and (2) what are the available resources whose licenses are part of this set. With CaLi, we provide an answer to the first concern. CaLi is a lattice-based model that partially orders licenses in terms of compatibility and compliance. In this demonstration, we illustrate the usability of CaLi through a prototype for the second concern. That is, based on a CaLi ordering of licenses we implement a license-based search engine which can answer questions such as "find licensed resources that can be reused under a given license" or "find licensed resources that can reuse a resource that has a particular license".