Re: FAQ : Is this vocabulary currently curated?

Hi Bernard:

My position is that while such meta-data can be useful, it is not mission-critical, because it is uncertain whether a declarative approach is sufficient or appropriate in here.

I would assume that in real, Web-scale scenarios, you need to derive the respective information from a multiplicity of signals, e.g.

- adoption rate in data
- HTTP header information

etc.

I would expect that most dead vocabularies on the Web, created in some PhD thesis project and long abandoned by its creator would still bear the "actively maintained" flag in the code.

Also, as of now, the number of relevant Web ontologies is pretty small, so it is unclear whether an automated approach is cost-efficient.

As a general direction, I think the Semantic Web movement must focus on real engineering than "meta" issues - more good, well-maintained and documented ontologies than new methodologies for developing ontologies, or methodologies for developing methodologies for developing methodologies for developing methodologies for developing ontologies. The proof of the pudding is in the cooking ;-)

Just my 2 cents ;-)

Martin



On Nov 21, 2011, at 3:11 PM, Bernard Vatant wrote:

> [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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Bernard Vatant
> Vocabularies & Data Engineering
> Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
> Skype : bernard.vatant
> Linked Open Vocabularies
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Mondeca                             
> 3 cité Nollez 75018 Paris, France
> www.mondeca.com
> Follow us on Twitter : @mondecanews
>

Received on Monday, 21 November 2011 19:33:20 UTC