RE: [foaf-dev] FOAF / Dublin Core agreement

Wonderful news!

Thanks Shadi.

Best,
Emmanuelle

-----Mensaje original-----
De: public-wai-ert-request@w3.org [mailto:public-wai-ert-request@w3.org] En
nombre de Shadi Abou-Zahra
Enviado el: viernes, 13 de mayo de 2011 15:19
Para: ERT WG
Asunto: Fwd: [foaf-dev] FOAF / Dublin Core agreement

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [foaf-dev] FOAF / Dublin Core agreement
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 09:57:57 +0200
From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
To: foaf-dev Friend of a <foaf-dev@lists.foaf-project.org>

Hi folks. This was announced on dublincore.org last week while I was on the
road, so I only announced it informally in IRC. Any questions ask here or if
you prefer, offlist to me, Tom and Libby. I'm particularly interested to
hear from other RDF vocabulary maintainers who are interested in documenting
similar collaborative agreements.

>From http://dublincore.org/news/2011/    DCMI and the FOAF Project
announce a cooperation agreement:

"2011-05-02, DCMI and the FOAF Project have announced a cooperation
agreement outlining measures aimed at reinforcing the long-term viability of
the FOAF Vocabulary. DCMI will maintain an up-to-date snapshot of the FOAF
Vocabulary, temporarily host the vocabulary if needed, and assume
maintenance responsibility if the FOAF Project should cease its normal
activity. The two organizations see this cooperative agreement as an
opportunity for better integrating their vocabularies with semantic
alignments and for promoting the documentation of best-practice usage
patterns in which the two vocabularies are used in combination. The
agreement includes an affirmation of best-practice principles embodied in a
DCMI Generic Namespace Policy for RDF Vocabularies."

The main document is: http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-foaf/
"Agreement between DCMI and the FOAF Project"

See also the principles documented in
http://dublincore.org/documents/2011/05/02/dcmi-namespace-generic/ and which
both DC and FOAF subscribe to.

Basically we've finally written down something that has been discussed
informally for several years: a collaborative agreement between maintainers
of two RDF vocabularies that are often used together. Many thanks to Tom for
all his work on this, and for those discussions as they've evolved over the
years. I think we both hope it may serve as a template or at least a
conversation starter for maintainers of other RDF vocabularies too -- since
in RDF, independent vocabularies are so often deployed together, we have a
shared incentive to collaborate on long term preservation and maintainance.

The primary motivation was to deal with the occasional 'what happens if Dan
and Libby are in an airplane crash?' questions, by putting mechanisms in
place for another organization to take on the hosting and long-term
responsibilities for FOAF's core technical assets (the RDF vocab). But it's
also interesting as an exploration of the ways in which smaller, less
formally maintained vocabularies and more traditional,
organizationally-backed vocabularies can be deployed alongside each other,
and how some of the risks and benefits from these different approaches can
be balanced.

I'll copy the body of the agreement below, but see the DC Web site for
hypertext version. Expect to see updates regarding progress towards our
stated goals through the summer.

cheers,

Dan


---- ----- -----
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-foaf/  "Agreement between DCMI and the
FOAF Project"

Description of Document:	This agreement outlines specific measures to
be undertaken in cooperation between DCMI and the FOAF Project -- measures
aimed primarily at reinforcing the long-term viability of the FOAF
Vocabulary by addressing the risks inherent with having a single point of
failure. The two organizations also see this cooperation as an opportunity
for better integrating their vocabularies with alignments -- mutually
declared mappings between semantically overlapping terms -- and for
promoting the documentation of best-practice usage patterns in which the two
vocabularies are used in combination.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an open organization,
incorporated in Singapore as a public, not-for-profit Company limited by
Guarantee (registration number 200823602C), engaged in the development of
interoperable metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and
business models. DCMI is the maintenance organization for the vocabulary
DCMI Metadata Terms.

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) Project aims at creating a Web of
machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them, and the
things they create and do, using an open, decentralized technology for
connecting social Web sites and the people they describe. The FOAF Project
is the maintenance organization for the FOAF Vocabulary.

Preamble on shared goals

The FOAF Vocabulary and DCMI Metadata Terms are often used together in
applications, and both are consistently listed among the top vocabularies in
the Linked Data space. As organizations, DCMI and the FOAF Project share a
common interest in improving resource discovery across the boundaries of
information silos on the Web. They share also share a common concern for
balancing centralization and decentralization by encouraging the
stabilization of third-party extensions and companion vocabularies that
enhance the usefulness of the vocabularies they maintain.

This agreement outlines specific measures to be undertaken in cooperation
between DCMI and the FOAF Project -- measures aimed primarily at reinforcing
the long-term viability of the FOAF Vocabulary by addressing the risks
inherent with having a single point of failure. The two organizations also
see this cooperation as an opportunity for better integrating their
vocabularies with alignments
-- mutually declared mappings between semantically overlapping terms
-- and for promoting the documentation of best-practice usage patterns in
which the two vocabularies are used in combination.

Both organizations believe that arrangements of mutual support and
cooperation among vocabulary maintainers such as this agreement can improve
the long-term viability of RDF vocabularies in all niches of the Semantic
Web ecosystem -- from vocabularies maintained by small, agile, time-limited
projects or grass-roots initiatives to vocabularies maintained by stable
cultural memory organizations -- and offer this agreement as a potential
template for others.

Specific commitments

* FOAF will arrange for its DNS (Domain Name Service) to be controlled by a
Registrar account for FOAF as a project and will grant DCMI full technical
and administrative access to the Domain Name (xmlns.com).

* The FOAF Project commits to pay Domain fees so that it is always at least
one year, ideally two or more, paid in advance. DCMI commits to monitor this
situation and to step in and take temporary or long term control and
stewardship of the domain if the FOAF Project is no longer able or willing
to maintain the vocabulary.

* The FOAF Project affirms the maintenance and persistence principles
outlined in a DCMI Generic Namespace Policy and commits to make no semantic
changes in the FOAF vocabulary without advance public notice of at least two
weeks.

* This agreement is not a legally binding contract but the public expression
of a collaborative partnership. Collaboration will be re-evaluated and
re-affirmed annually. DCMI and the FOAF Project have chosen this mechanism
rather than a binding and final transfer since it provides a more scalable
template for other collaborative relationships. The agreement may, with no
ill-will, be publicly ended by either party at any time.

* The FOAF Project leads, Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, expect to manage
all matters related to vocabulary maintenance in-house for the foreseeable
future, including long-term planning for contingencies by which the project
leads would become unable to manage the vocabularies themselves. DCMI's
engagement with the FOAF Project serves both to promote active collaboration
between the two vocabulary maintenance organizations and to underwrite the
long-term viability of the FOAF vocabulary domain should the FOAF Project
for any reason cease its normal activity. This collaboration also gives both
projects a mechanism for sharing among themselves, and the wider community,
details of their preservation-planning activities.
DCMI and FOAF will take measures to keep contact information reciprocally
available and inform each other on plans and developments concerning their
namespaces. Service outages of a few hours, even days, are a natural feature
of the Web and are something for which implementers should plan. However, in
the event that the FOAF namespace should become unavailable on the Web for
an unusually extended period (e.g., more than two weeks), and communication
with the FOAF Project leads cannot be established, DCMI agrees to step in
and use its DNS access to arrange for temporary public hosting of the latest
copy of FOAF namespace documentations. To prepare for this contingency, DCMI
will download and periodically refresh a copy of the FOAF Subversion
project.

* For the longer term, if DCMI should find itself as the publisher of the
final results of a FOAF Project that has ceased activity, DCMI will maintain
the documentation of FOAF in conformance with the surrounding technical
infrastructure (e.g., in response to a revision of W3C Resource Description
Framework).
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Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 14:23:31 UTC