Re: I've built www.vocabs.org - A community driven website that allows you to build RDF vocabularies

Hi Bernard,

Thanks for your suggestions and comments. Definitely, I think there needs
to be some sort of birds-eye view on the entire vocabulary ecosystem in the
RDF community.

Does the idea of www.vocabs.org make sense? You can comment using N-Triples
syntax (Turtle to be supported), so anybody can extend a specific
vocabulary. Then based on the amount of votes a specific comment gets, it
will be more valuable, and it will automatically find its place in the
final vocabulary: say 2 comments define the same "hasColor" property, only
one has "10 points" and the other has only "2 points". The system will
automatically do the filtering, and only the highest scored comments will
find their place in the final vocabulary.

So in essence this is very similar to opening your text editor, and writing
some Turtle syntax down. The cool part is that it happens online, so other
people can immediately comment and validate what you wrote.

Thanks,
Luca


On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
> wrote:

> Hi Luca
>
> Welcome to the vocabularies galaxy. I cc to the public-vocabs list, which
> might be more relevant for this topic.
>
> Seems to me the best ways to learn to write (a little) is to read (a lot).
> Books, apps, tutorials and so on are fine. But above all, read vocabularies
> to figure out from examples done by people who know just a bit more than
> you do. You have more than 300 examples listed in the Linked Open
> Vocabularies data base [1], including the famous wine ontology developed
> along with the OWL recommandation [2]
> As for your idea of collaborative construction, I think it's worth the
> try, you'll see how it flies. The vocabularies are a critical part of the
> linked data ecosystem (their genetic code, sort of), raising complex
> technical and social issues, and a global governance model still to be
> invented. Next Dublin Core conference in September will focus on this issue
> [3]
>
> Regarding the complexity of building and publishing a vocabulary, after
> years of struggling with Protege and other ontology editors, I've come to
> the point that if you're not building a complex ontology with thousands of
> axioms, but a basic vocabulary with typically 10-20 classes and a similar
> number of properties, without fancy logical constructs, you just need a
> good text editor and learn a bit of Turtle, and for publication rely on
> public stylesheets or cool services such as Parrot.
> The only tricky (just a bit) part being the server configuration for
> content negotiation, but that's not very big deal either.
>
> It figures that we (the linked data vocabularies community) definitely
> should provide a good tutorial on "Publish your simple vocabularies using
> Turtle". I should put that on my backburner, actually.
>
> Best regards
>
> [1] http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov
> [2] http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/details/vocabulary_vin.html
> [3] http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/dc-2013
>
> 2013/2/14 Luca Matteis <lmatteis@gmail.com>
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> It's my first time here, but I've been attracted to the Linked data
>> initiative for quite a while now. A couple of weeks ago I needed to build
>> my first RDF vocabulary.. I cannot tell you how hard this process was for
>> an RDF newbie as myself. I had to read a couple of books, and read a lot
>> all over the web before I could get a grasp of it all.
>>
>> Even after understanding the linked-data context, and how the
>> technologies involved worked, I was still left with a set of tools that I
>> thought were pretty limited. I had to download apps, that did or didn't
>> work. And learn various different programming APIs to generate the RDF that
>> I wanted. I can only imagine the difficulty a non-techie person would have
>> when trying to build a vocabulary.
>>
>> Another issue that I confronted when looking for existing vocabularies,
>> was that most of the time they were created by a single entity (a group of
>> people) that knows about the lexicon of the subject. I think this is quite
>> limited as well. A vocabulary should be open and agreed upon a group of
>> people. It should be community-driven. It should be crowd-sourced and
>> validated, the same way correct answers are validated on Stackoverflow.
>>
>> So in a couple of days I built http://www.vocabs.org/ that does exactly
>> this. It allows people, with very little technical experience, to start
>> creating vocabularies (entirely through the web-interface). Not only that,
>> but different users can then join and comment, and add new vocabulary
>> terms. An example of this: http://www.vocabs.org/term/WineOntology(*hint* click "download" at the top).
>>
>> I was just wondering what the Semantic community thinks of this idea. I
>> hope it's clear what I'm trying to achieve here, but maybe a better
>> explanation would be here: http://www.vocabs.org/about
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *Bernard Vatant
> *
> Vocabularies & Data Engineering
> Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
>  Skype : bernard.vatant
> Blog : the wheel and the hub <http://blog.hubjects.com/>
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