[Feature Request] Machine interpretable terms of use

[HLWeil]

Currently, in ARCs (and most other git repositories), licenses are used to specify access conditions in a human readable way.

But..

• there may be special cases not covered by these standard licenses. E.g. when the Data results from funding prohibiting usage of the data outside a given country.
• it would be beneficial to store these conditions in a machine interpretable format. This allows automatic acting on the conditions, e.g. blocking users from accessing data they are not allowed to use and helping users find data which they are allowed to use

I propose the extension of the ARC specification by such an machine interpretable terms of use file. In the context of the bio NFDIs, the datamodel defined in ODRL might be a good candidate. Formatted as JSON-LD, it could be parsed with relative ease and seamlessly integrated in the ARC-RO-Crate representation too.

In the ARC scaffold, we could store it in the root-level. My proposed name would be TermsOfUse.json, but this is up for discussion.

@arendd
@feserm
@muehlhaus
@Brilator
@kMutagene

For reference, requirements and possible solutions were thorougly discussed on the 3rd Biohackathon Germany.

[Brilator]

IMO, an optional ODRL / routine to document an ARC'S terms of use would be a great addition and would align well with existing research data policies (e.g. in CEPLAS).
I'm wondering how much this can be aligned with or complementary to Git's existing LICENSE file.