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Ownership, structure and the ethical framework the project holds itself to. Where something is not yet in place, this page says so rather than implying otherwise.
Stated precisely, because vagueness here is how heritage projects become extractive.
Not owned by this project, and never claimed
The tradition itself. The òrìṣà, the Odù, the proverbs, the Ifá corpus, the oríkì, the historical facts, the place names, the dates. None of that belongs to anyone who works on this site. Facts are not copyrightable and traditional knowledge is not ours.
Not owned, but used lawfully and with attribution
The published scholarship this corpus draws on. Facts and ideas may be freely taken from another work; expression may not. The corpus restates in its own prose and cites the source, and does not reproduce another author's selection, arrangement or wording. Third-party translations remain the property of their translators, are always attributed, and are treated as licensable material rather than free stock.
Owned by the project
The selection and arrangement of the corpus, protected as a compilation; the original prose; our own translations and glosses; the structured data schemas and the extraction work; the verification methodology and its documented findings; the concept graph; the software; and the design system.
We charge for the work we did. We do not charge for access to the heritage.
Two entities, so that the heritage material and the commercial software do not compromise each other.
A nonprofit entity holds the corpus, receives grant funding, runs the free public resource, and employs the people who work on it. Because it is a nonprofit there is no owner extracting profit from heritage material, which answers the extraction question structurally rather than by promise.
A separate for-profit entity owns the platform software and licenses it, including to other language and heritage communities who want the same apparatus for their own material.
This is the shape Wikimedia uses, with the Foundation holding the projects and Wikimedia Enterprise as a subsidiary handling commercial licensing, and the shape Mozilla uses. It is well precedented and it survives scrutiny from either direction.
Two things on this page are commitments rather than facts on the ground. They are marked as such, because a reviewer who catches one overstatement discounts the whole page.
Being formalised. Neither entity is incorporated yet. The project currently operates as unincorporated work by its contributors, and this line will be replaced with a registration number and a jurisdiction when one exists, not before.
Being assembled. No members have accepted an appointment, so none are named. A board page listing members, affiliations and roles goes up when there are members to list.
The forms under consideration are a federal not-for-profit corporation under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act for the corpus-holding entity, and either a Community Contribution Company or a Benefit Company under the British Columbia Business Corporations Act for the software side. The first prohibits distributing profits to members or directors; the latter two carry a statutory asset lock or an articled public-benefit purpose. Which is chosen determines what this page can promise, so no promise is made here yet.
The intended shape is weighted toward Nigeria-based scholars, with òrìṣà custodians and practitioners alongside them rather than consulted after the fact, and its role is to review methodology, adjudicate contested material, and hold the project to the commitments on these pages. The roster, affiliations and role of each member will be published, which is the disclosure practice comparable heritage projects follow.
Published in 2019 by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, CARE is the people-and-purpose framework that sits alongside the data-centric FAIR principles. This project holds itself to it, so here is what each letter obliges.
Collective benefit
The material stays free to the community it came from. The corpus is not a dataset extracted from Yorùbá people for someone else's benefit, and the free-forever commitment is what makes that structural rather than rhetorical.
Authority to control
Custodians and lineages hold authority over their own material. Where a lineage has not consented to publication, the material does not go up, and where a claim of that kind is made about material already published, it comes down while the claim is resolved.
Responsibility
The obligation runs to the community, not only to the reader. That means citing generously and sending readers to the original authors and their books, marking gaps rather than filling them, and taking correction from Yorùbá scholars and practitioners as a standing obligation rather than a courtesy.
Ethics
Nothing devotional, initiatory or ritual is sold. Initiate-held knowledge is named as initiate-held and left alone. Ifá verse content is not licensed for generative AI training, because the foreseeable downstream harm outweighs any revenue and the decision is not a close one.
Digital archives that apply CARE typically do it at the record level, with Traditional Knowledge labels and provenance notices attached to individual items rather than to the collection as a whole. This corpus does the equivalent through its confidence ratings and its explicit refusal lists, and record-level rights labelling is the direction of travel rather than something already implemented.
The project aligns itself with the UNESCO Ethical Principles for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (2015), which hold that economic activity around living heritage must not undermine its viability, must respect the moral and material interests of the communities concerned, and must benefit them.
In practice that means the material stays free to the community it came from, the scholarship is cited and readers are actively driven to the original authors, nothing devotional or ritual is sold, and correction is a standing obligation.
A reference work is only citable if it will still be there. Two answers, one of them settled and one of them not.
The corpus text carries a share-alike licence, so it can be forked and rehosted by anyone, permanently, regardless of what happens to this organisation. That is the durable half of the answer and it does not depend on anyone's goodwill.
Not in place. No deposit arrangement with an institutional repository exists yet. This is one of the first things a library procurement process or a grant reviewer asks about, so it is named as absent rather than described as planned.