Cave Registry Data Archive

....keeping data safe

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Terms and Conditions

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Draft: This has not been formally approved by BCA council, and therefore only gives the flavour of the intent!

  1. Repositories are available to all BCA affiliated clubs and individual members for the storage and use of cave-related data.
  2. Each repository must nominate 2 contact members, co-ordinators, to approve rights with the BCA cave-registry administrator.
  3. Repository contacts must ensure an up to date description of the data within there repository.
  4. Backups are taken for disaster recovery and to maintain an archive. Backups are not there to recover lost data, version control should be sufficient for this purpose, [along with the considered appointment of rights].
  5. Data should be licensed under an open licence, (see Appendix 1) unless there are exceptional reasons to reserve other rights or keep data confidential. To ensure that the cave-registry is allowed to hold the data, non-open licences, for all or part of the dataset, must be approved by the cave-registry officers.(See Appendix 2 for possible reserved rights).
  6. Data rights will remain with the club or individuals, and must be listed in the file COPYRIGHT.txt (Appendix 3). This must state that the BCA cave-registry has the right to hold and backup the data. This file should also contain fall over rights, which should go ultimatly fall to the BCA.
  7. If a repository has not been used for 5 years and there has been no contact from the repository contacts, the cave-registry or BCA may opt to try to make contact, via the contact methods provided, and then by other means such as the national press (not for completely secret data). If no response is received the rights to the data will follow the fall over situation..
  8. For rights transferred to the BCA: In the event of the BCA ceasing to exit,
    • if a comparable non-commercial national body exists the rights held by BCA of the data will be transferred.

    • if no comparable body exists, the data for which the BCA holds rights will be made fully open and a suitable home sought.
  9. The preferred formats for data storage are, in order of preference
    • Open text format.

    • Open formats, preferably as given in Appendix 4.

    • Other formats.

  10. Data structure and meanings should be described in a directory in the root of the repository called DataStructure. This should include: (See Structuring Your Data pages [TODO] for more information.)
    • Detailed description of the original data.

    • How the dataset is derived from the original data.

    • The data structure.

    • Encoding for open formats not in appendix 3 and other closed formats.

    • The licence(s) the data is released under.

  11. Where the credits and rights information is to be found.

  12. The service may be withdrawn with 90 days notice. This notice will be served on the nominated contacts and by any such additional means as the BCA may choose.

 


 

Appendix 1

Open Licence currently recognized

Creative Commons

GPL

Any form of the licence with derivatives allowed.

It is recommended that Share alike is added, and attribution may be nice.

 


 

Appendix 2

Possible reserved rights

 

It is possible to keep restrict a whole repository or any part of it, however full, openness is encouraged.

Cave-registry regards data as

  • Secret - a Repository exists but no access or acknowledgement of the data. (the only publication will be of the total size of storage of all the secret data.

  • Private – Repository exists, but no access is given. The area and data held will be described on the cave-registry wiki.

  • Restricted – Data is accessible to all registered users of any cave-registry repository, but not to anonymous users (This will usually be used with Limited)

  • Limited – Data is held under a more restricted licence (this will usually be used with restricted)

  • Open – complies with Appendix 1

 


 

Appendix 3

COPYRIGHT.txt

This file(s) is used to show attribution and rights of the data, including what should be done in a fall over situation, when contact is lost.

COPYRIGHT.txt may be contained in many directories, however, must be present in the root directory of the repository. The root COPYRIGHT.txt could be used for listing all files, where a blanket clause exists, it will cover all files and folders in the same directory as the COPYRIGHT.txt files. If lower down the tree, the rights change the location of the overriding COPYRIGHT.txt should be given.

 

Must contain 3 sections with the following keys in uppercase given on an individual line before the section. (Sample file [TODO])

ATTIBUTION

Who the work should be attributed to, or where the attribution can be located in the data files.

COPYRIGHT

Who owns the copyright or where it can be located in the data files and and what rights are reserved, or allowable use.

FALLOVER

What happens to the rights of the data, if contact is lost. This is not needed for most Open Licences, and should be left blank.

 


Appendix 4

*Data files*

*Preferred formats*

Plain text (.txt)

Survex (.svx)

Therion (.th)



*Acceptable formats*

Compass (.dat ?)

(Other common surveying software file formats?)



*Vector Drawing files*

*Preferred formats*

Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)

Autocad DXF (.dxf) – widely support and parsable plain text file

Therion sketch (.th2)

Tunnel XML (.xml)



*Acceptable formats*

Portable Document Format (.pdf)

Postscript (.ps)

Encapsulated postscript (.eps)



*Bitmap Image files*

*Preferred formats*

Portable Network Graphic (.png)

Jpeg (.jpg)

*Acceptable formats*

Tagged Image File (.tif)

 

Last Updated on Thursday, 23 April 2015 19:20