Licensing and Database Rights
Martialis is not one thing under one licence. Code, data, and vocabulary have different purposes, and different terms apply to each.
Maker
Maker of the database: Frederico Muñoz, Lisbon, Portugal (ORCID 0009-0000-9488-3542). Martialis™ is a trademark of Frederico Muñoz.
The three tiers
| Tier | What | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Code | This application, and the martialis-db tooling | AGPL-3.0-or-later |
| Database | Every entity record, claim, and source in the graph | CC-BY-SA-4.0 |
| Vocabulary | The ontology, SHACL shapes, SKOS vocabularies, and JSON-LD context | CC0-1.0, public domain |
Attribution
Attribution request (not a licence term for the CC0 vocabulary, a condition for the CC-BY-SA database). CC-BY-SA only requires attribution "in any reasonable manner based on the medium." One over-specified string can be inappropriate for different usages, so three forms are provided:
Short: for tight media, a single record, an inline citation:
Martialis (https://martial.is), CC BY-SA 4.0
When quoting one lineage, one style, or one claim, cite that record's own URL (the one shown in its "Linked data" section, and pre-filled as "Cite as:" there) in place of the bare domain above: that is the specific thing being reused, not the whole database.
Standard: the default, for a reference list or a credit line:
Martialis: Martial Arts Lineage Database, Frederico Muñoz (ORCID 0009-0000-9488-3542), https://martial.is - CC BY-SA 4.0
Academic: for a paper's data-availability statement or bibliography:
Muñoz, F. (2026) Martialis: Martial Arts lineage database [Data set]. https://github.com/Martial-IS/martialis-db
martialis-db's CITATION.cff
is the machine-readable source for the name/ORCID/title above, and is what GitHub's own "Cite this
repository" button reads. Once a release is tagged and a Zenodo DOI is minted (tracked in
martialis-db's own release notes), the academic form above becomes a versioned, dated DOI citation
instead. Watch CITATION.cff for that update rather than relying on this page having caught up.
Sui generis database right
Beyond the copyright licences above, the maker asserts the sui generis database right under Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases (Portugal: Decreto-Lei n.º 122/2000).
- The right protects the substantial investment made in obtaining, verifying, and presenting the database's contents (Art. 7): the sourcing, cross-checking, and confidence assessment behind every record.
- It is automatic, requires no registration, and lasts 15 years from completion of the database. Substantial new investment restarts the term.
- It applies independently of, and in addition to, the CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence above.
- Repeated and systematic extraction or re-utilisation of insubstantial parts of the database is prohibited where it conflicts with normal exploitation or unreasonably prejudices the maker's legitimate interests (Art. 7(5)).
Text and data mining
Under the EU's Digital Single Market Directive, Art. 4 gives anyone a text-and-data-mining exception that overrides the CC-BY-SA-4.0 conditions above (no attribution, no share-alike) unless the rightsholder reserves it in a machine-readable way.
The maker reserves Art. 4 TDM rights over the database tier. This is signalled on every response
for that tier via the tdm-reservation HTTP header and in
/.well-known/tdmrep.json, per the W3C
TDMRep specification.
This reservation restricts nobody who complies with the CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence: attribute the source and share derivatives under the same terms, and mining the data is unaffected. It removes only the statutory bypass around those conditions.
Two things this reservation does not touch:
- Research use is unaffected. Art. 3 of the same Directive gives research organisations and cultural heritage institutions a TDM exception that cannot be overridden. If that is you, mine freely.
- The ontology, SHACL shapes, and JSON-LD context are not reserved. Those are CC0-1.0 and are
meant to be embedded and reused as widely as possible:
tdm-reservation: 0on those paths, and search/crawler access to the whole site is unaffected either way.
Anyone commercially training on the database tier outside the CC-BY-SA-4.0 terms should contact the maker.
Contributions
Code contributions require a Developer Certificate of Origin. Data contributions are dedicated to the public domain (CC0-1.0) on the way in. This is an asymmetric grant, mirroring how a code CLA typically takes a broader grant than the project gives back, so the database can stay relicense-able on the way out. See martialis-db's CONTRIBUTING.md for the full terms.
Full text
The complete, canonical statement of these terms lives with the database itself: martialis-db's LICENSING.md. This page summarises it for the site.