Thoughts on the future of ccLicense.py

With the Validator up and running, I’ve been thinking more about cclicense.py, and how it could be used on it’s own. My conclusion is that in an effort to make it handle all the RDF requirements of the Validator, I’ve pretty much screwed it up for use on it’s own. Not that it couldn’t be used on its own, but the APIs are inconsistent, poorly documented and incomplete. I’d like to remedy that so it feels like I’ve completed something else. To that end, I think these are the goals for a good Python API for Creative Commons licenses:

• the ability to consume and emit existing licenses in RDF
• the flexibility to discover new licensing terms through introspecting the incoming RDF
• the ability to get and set basic license permissions
• intelligent handling of Work, Agent and other “sub-objects”
• clarity of API so that simple solutions are obvious and complex solutions are clearly possible

I think the biggest problem I have with the current API is that it is very biased towards consuming and reading licenses; a successful API should probably have a balance between reading and writing licenses.