LICENCE.md

Licensing

This repository is not one licensable thing, and a single grant at the root would misdescribe most of it. What follows states what is settled, what is not, and one exclusion that must never become untrue.

Component map

component	status
zenodo/epitran_extensions/ — grapheme→IPA rule sets	✅ Contributions under CC0 1.0. WHG proceeds on the basis that such rows attract no rights, and the CC0 dedication exists so nothing turns on it. ⚠ The v7 Zenodo record states CC BY 4.0 at the record level; that stands for v7 and is to be revisited for v8. See zenodo/epitran_extensions/LICENCE.md.
Model weights (hf/model.safetensors)	✅ CC BY 4.0, as published within the Zenodo deposit (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18682017, 2026-02-22). ✅ Checked 2026-09-07: hf/README.md already declares license: cc-by-4.0, so the model card and the deposit agree.
WHG's own code	✅ BSD 3-Clause — see LICENSE. Matches WorldHistoricalGazetteer/whg3, same copyright holder (University of Pittsburgh), same scoping to "WHG's own code".
Third-party dependencies	Unchanged, under their own terms. Nothing here alters them.
Ingested authority data	Not licensed by WHG; see below.

Ingested authority data is not ours to license

processing/settings.py records a license_spdx per authority. Twelve distinct terms are currently declared, including CC0-1.0, CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0, ODbL-1.0, ODC-By-1.0 and four bespoke custom-* terms — and CC-BY-NC-4.0 and CC-BY-ND-4.0.

⚠ The last two are named rather than smoothed over. This project's outputs are derivatives by construction: toponyms are extracted, transcribed and embedded. An ND source is therefore a genuine unresolved question, not a labelling detail, and a NC source constrains commercial reuse of anything derived from it. This file does not resolve either, and no statement here should be read as a grant over data WHG did not create.

Per-source terms are surfaced to consumers through the gazetteer registry and the namespaces[] field of API responses. Ingestion is deliberately not gated on licence — attribution is handled at the point of use.

🛑 EXCLUDED CONTENT — must never enter this repository

Some material used by this project is cleared for acquisition and research use only, and not for publication or redistribution. It is held outside the repository and must stay there.

Currently excluded: the RCAHMW Long-Held Place Names (LHPN) Welsh/English name-variant data, held at /vast/ishi/lhpn with its own licence notice. Cleared verbally for acquisition and model training; publication and redistribution are NOT cleared.

⚠ Nothing in this file grants any licence over excluded content, and no permissive statement here should be read as a reason to commit it.

✅ This is enforced mechanically, not by prose. tests/test_no_restricted_content.py fails on any path or file content matching the restricted set. An exclusion that only exists in a document is honoured until the first person who has not read it — if you are adding restricted material, that test is what should stop you, and if it does not, the test is the defect.

Attribution

World Historical Gazetteer, Symphonym: Universal Phonetic Embeddings for Cross-Script Name Matching — Models and Evaluation Data. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682017

Required of the v8 deposit

✅ Decided (SG, 7 Sep 2026): the relationship between the record-level licence and the per-component terms must be STATED at the deposit for v8, not left to be inferred.

The v7 record states CC BY 4.0 at record level while the rule sets inside it are dedicated CC0. CC0 is the more permissive, so a recipient relying on the record-level licence is never wrong — they would simply be over-complying for part of the deposit. That is an ambiguity rather than a conflict, and it is resolved by saying so.

🛑 Concretely, and this closes the defect that prompted the whole exercise: SHIP THE LICENCE FILES INSIDE THE DEPOSIT. The v7 archive contains no LICENSE, COPYING or NOTICE anywhere — the CC BY 4.0 claim exists only in Zenodo's record metadata, so anyone who takes the files from the archive, or from GitHub, sees no licence at all. ⚠ A licence that lives only in a catalogue record does not travel with the bytes.

So the v8 deposit must:

1. Contain LICENCE.md and zenodo/epitran_extensions/LICENCE.md, so the terms travel with the files.
2. State in the record description that the record-level licence is a floor, with per-component terms given inside — rather than implying one licence governs everything in the deposit.
3. Attribute the upstream sources, not only WHG. ⚠ The attribution obligations in the deposit are inherited: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and Getty TGN (ODC-By 1.0) both require attributing them. A record saying "CC BY 4.0, attribute WHG" understates the obligation. Name GeoNames and Getty TGN as upstream sources — which is also the house position everywhere else: WHG asserts its terms alongside each source's, never instead of them.

✅ The "floor" framing was checked before being relied on, and the check is the generalisable part. "The record-level licence is a floor" is only safe if nothing in the deposit is MORE restrictive than the record — otherwise a recipient relying on it over-claims rights, which is a worse failure than over-complying. Verified against the training inputs: GeoNames CC BY 4.0, Wikidata CC0, Getty TGN ODC-By 1.0 — no share-alike and no NonCommercial, so the most restrictive input is attribution-required and the record-level CC BY 4.0 matches it. ⚠ This could easily have gone the other way: WHG's index as a whole is ~42.7% share-alike, dominated by OSM/ODbL, and an ODbL or NC source in the training set would have raised a real question. Those sources are not in it.

Checked and found not to apply

NEH funding. ✅ All of the work in this repository postdates the NEH funding, so NEH's terms do not reach any of it (SG, 7 Sep 2026). Recorded rather than left silent, because the question will be asked again and re-deriving the answer costs more than reading it.

⚠ What the terms would have required, had they applied, and one part of it is not what people expect. NEH General Terms §XI.B–C (2 CFR §200.315–316) leave intangible property with the recipient, while the Federal Government retains a non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable licence to reproduce, prepare derivative works from, publish and use it, and to authorise others to do so. Open licensing is a superset of that, so it would have constrained nothing here — but because the reservation is irrevocable and non-exclusive, it would block an EXCLUSIVE commercial licence over anything it did cover. 🛑 That is a live consideration for WHG generally, even though it does not touch this repository, and it is the half most likely to be overlooked, since the reservation reads as permissive until someone tries to grant exclusivity.

Resolved elsewhere

✅ whg3's NOTICE.md previously read as applying CC BY-NC 4.0 to contributed datasets. ⚠ The error was scope, not licence — NC is WHG's curation overlay, asserted alongside each source's own terms, and applying it to other people's material was self-defeating besides, since CC BY 4.0 §2(a)(5)(B) forbids imposing downstream restrictions on material WHG received under it. Corrected in whg3 (080bc72c4).