license-normaliser 0.1

Comprehensive license normalization with a three-level hierarchy.

Comprehensive license normalization with a three-level hierarchy.

license-normaliser is a comprehensive license normalization library that maps any license representation (SPDX tokens, URLs, prose descriptions) to a canonical three-level hierarchy.

Features

• Three-level hierarchy - LicenseFamily → LicenseName → LicenseVersion

• Wide format support - SPDX tokens, URLs, prose descriptions

• Creative Commons support - Full CC family with versions and IGO variants

• Publisher-specific licenses - Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, ACS, and more

• Caching - LRU caching for performance

• CLI - Command-line interface for quick normalization

Hierarchy

The library uses a three-level hierarchy:

1. LicenseFamily - broad bucket: "cc", "osi", "copyleft", "publisher-tdm", …

2. LicenseName - version-free: "cc-by", "cc-by-nc-nd", "mit", "wiley-tdm"

3. LicenseVersion - fully resolved: "cc-by-3.0", "cc-by-nc-nd-4.0"

Installation

With uv:

uv pip install license-normaliser

Or with pip:

pip install license-normaliser

Quick start

from license_normaliser import normalise_license

v = normalise_license("CC BY-NC-ND 4.0")
str(v)                 # "cc-by-nc-nd-4.0"  ← LicenseVersion
str(v.license)         # "cc-by-nc-nd"      ← LicenseName
str(v.license.family)  # "cc"               ← LicenseFamily

Resolution pipeline (first match wins)

1. Direct registry lookup (cleaned lowercase key)

2. Alias table (prose variants, SPDX tokens, mixed-case short-forms)

3. Exact URL map (http/https, trailing-slash normalised, fragment-aware)

4. Structural CC URL regex (any creativecommons.org URL not in the map)

5. Prose keyword scan (full sentences from license documents)

6. Fallback (key = cleaned string, everything else unknown/None)

CLI usage

Normalize a single license:

license-normaliser normalise "MIT"
# Output: mit

license-normaliser normalise --full "CC BY 4.0"
# Output:
# Key: cc-by-4.0
# URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
# License: cc-by
# Family: cc

Batch normalize multiple licenses:

license-normaliser batch MIT "Apache-2.0" "CC BY 4.0"
# Output:
# MIT: mit
# Apache-2.0: apache-2.0
# CC BY 4.0: cc-by-4.0

Testing

All tests run inside Docker to prevent accidental side effects:

make test

To test a specific Python version:

make test-env ENV=py312

License

MIT

Support

For issues, go to GitHub.

Author

Artur Barseghyan <[e-mail]>