Re: BioPortal

On Jan 9, 2007, at 6:43 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
> 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.

That certainly was not our intention, Alan, but I will take another  
look at our boilerplate.


>
> 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.

Good point.


>
> 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.
>

Point well taken.


> 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.
>

We'll add this as a new requirement.  We need to be more clear about  
who "the submitter" is.



> 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?
>

Currently, BioPortal is meant to be used as a repository only.   
Future releases may have more support of broader development activities.

We are still in a pre-release mode until Feb 1, and these comments  
are extremely valuable to us.  As the workof the HCLS SIG is  
precisely the kind of activity that we have a mandate to support, we  
very much want to work with you to make our resource work for you.   
Your feedback has already been very helpful.

Mark

Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 15:22:32 UTC