Re: FAQ : Is this vocabulary currently curated?

[Answering to myself default of any better interlocutor here]

This has been posted almost one month ago now and had triggered absolutely
no follow-up either on-list or off-list, either for the generic question or
for a particular vocabulary. I posted it on Google+, pushing it
specifically to a circle of people I had identified as vocabulary creators
or contributors, with identical feedback : none whatsoever.

I find this silence definitely puzzling. Does it mean that indeed nobody
cares about this? Is the issue ill-defined? Or what?

Bernard

2011/10/24 Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>

> Hi all
>
> After more than six months of work at Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) [1],
> I would like to start a discussion about a certain number of  desirable
> metadata currently lacking in vocabularies description.
> Basically, in the best of cases as it stands, the vocabulary metadata
> includes in the owl:Ontology description a couple of dcterms properties
> such as dcterms:created, dcterms:modified, dcterms:creator,
> dcterms:contributor, dcterms:publisher. Those properties are not always
> explicit in the RDF specification of the vocabulary, but can often be
> extracted from the html documentation.
>
> Useful as they are, those metadata do not help to answer some critical
> questions for a potential user  :
>
> Is this vocabulary currently curated?
> Is it stable, or is it likely to change in the future?
> How could I know when changes occur, and what those changes are? is there
> a track of older versions?
> ... and if the above questions are not explicitly answered in metadata,
> whom should I contact to know more about it, or nobody is in charge any
> more?
>
> The question comes up particularly when the vocabulary has been sitting on
> the Web for quite a few years. Some vocabularies listed in LOV have a
> dcterms:modified value tracking back to 2003, meaning basically that
> nothing happened since. This can be interpreted either as good news
> (stability) or bad news (no more evolution/curation). In such cases,
> whatever the quality of the vocabulary, a potential adopter is bound to
> think that this vocabulary has been put on a shelf somewhere, and somehow
> forgotten by its initial publishers. A supposition that turns out to be
> true when the vocabulary is a by-product of a project long ago wrapped up.
> Sometimes a potential curator has not even the access to the vocabulary
> namespace and would not be able to update, modify, fix the vocabulary
> whatsoever.
>
> Curiously enough, unless I miss something, I could not find in all
> metadata vocabularies gathered in LOV any dedicated properties such as
> "status", "current curator" or "last known curator", so I think about
> adding such properties to VOAF [2]
> Meanwhile, if you are the current curator of one or more of the
> vocabularies listed at [1], and particularly if the said vocabulariy lacks
> metadata, or you know more about its current status, feel free to ping me
> here or off-list so that a short sentence about the vocabulary status can
> at least be added in the description, and that we can think about the best
> way to represent it as structured metadata.
>
> Thanks for your attention
>
> [1] http://labs.mondeca.com/dataset/lov/
> [2] http://labs.mondeca.com/vocab/voaf
>
>
>
> *Bernard Vatant
> *
> Vocabularies & Data Engineering
> Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
>  Skype : bernard.vatant
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
>
> *Mondeca**          **                   *
> 3 cité Nollez 75018 Paris, France
> www.mondeca.com
> Follow us on Twitter : @mondecanews <http://twitter.com/#%21/mondecanews>
>
>


-- 
*Bernard Vatant
*
Vocabularies & Data Engineering
Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
 Skype : bernard.vatant
Linked Open Vocabularies <http://labs.mondeca.com/dataset/lov>

--------------------------------------------------------
*Mondeca**          **                   *
3 cité Nollez 75018 Paris, France
www.mondeca.com
Follow us on Twitter : @mondecanews <http://twitter.com/#%21/mondecanews>