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

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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