BioPortal

I've taken a quick look at the BioPortal and have some initial comments:

1) The terms of service says: "Except as expressly prohibited on the  
Site, you are permitted to view, copy, print and distribute  
publications and documents within this Site, subject to your  
agreement that:... You will display the below copyright notice and  
other proprietary notices on every copy you make"

I read this as saying that anything submitted to the repository would  
be copyright "Copyright © 2005–2006, The Board of Trustees of Leland  
Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.", which I would  
guess some would consider unacceptable.

2) Termination of Use: You agree that The National Center for  
Biomedical Ontology may, in its sole discretion, at any time  
terminate your access to the Site and any account(s) you may have in  
connection with the Site. Access to the Site may be monitored by The  
National Center for Biomedical Ontology.
This is scary. There ought to be explicit cause for termination,  
otherwise people might be reluctant to entrust their work to the site.

3) Disclaimer: "... PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE"  
BASIS...". The W3C has taken steps to ensure that access to the files  
hosted at the W3C domain will be maintained under a variety of  
circumstances, using mirrors, externals services, etc. It would be  
desirable that similar actions be taken by the NCBO, and some mention  
of them included in the terms of service, particularly if URIs in the  
bioontology.org namespace are to be used.

4) Use of ontologies: "Only the submitter of the ontology will be  
able to modify it or submit new versions". In a project such as ours  
that is group oriented, it is likely that individuals will come and  
go. I think there needs to be some notion of group access so that we  
aren't vulnerable to a key individual becoming unavailable.

5) It wasn't clear to me whether there was developer support e.g. svn  
access. I don't know whether Helen et. all had in mind using such  
services at W3C, but such access is certainly part of the development  
cycle of projects such as ours. Is the model that ontology developers  
use external sites for this and only submit relatively stable  
versions of the ontology to the BioPortal?

Best,

Alan



On Jan 9, 2007, at 8:49 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:

>
> I'd like to put in a vote that we take Mark up on his offer to have  
> the files hosted on the BioPortal. I think this is consistent with  
> the portion of the charter that says "HCLS will actively coordinate  
> with groups and consortia within Life Sciences and Health Care  
> areas: ... Research Institutes and Centers".
>
> The NCBO's mission is to support exactly what Helen is requesting.  
> Should there be any any advantage we see to storing the data at W3C  
> over NCBO, let's give that feedback to them and see if they can  
> address it.
>
> -Alan
>
> On Jan 8, 2007, at 7:10 PM, Mark Musen wrote:
>
>> Helen,
>>
>> We'd be delighted to have you consider hosting these files on the  
>> BioPortal ontology repository that we are creating as part of the  
>> National Center for Biomedical Ontology (see http:// 
>> www.bioontology.org/ncbo/faces/index.xhtml).  We soon will be  
>> releasing BioPortal to the community, and this repository was  
>> created for just the purpose that you have in mind.
>>
>> Anyone can give the pre-release version a spin; we are extremely  
>> eager for feedback.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Mark
>>
>>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 14:43:32 UTC