Re: status and problems on sematicweb.org

Hi all

A related issue is that under semanticweb.org domain or subdomains are
living several vocabularies (ontologies), some of them are used in the
linked data space, either by published data sets or other vocabularies
relying on them.

But their status is variable. Examples :

http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/ontology is alive and well so far
and re-used e.g., by http://online-presence.net/opo/ns

http://proton.semanticweb.org/2005/04/protons# is alive and well so far
and re-used e.g., by http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/sport/

But

http://www.semanticweb.org/ontologies/2009/2/HumanEmotions.owl is 404,
although http://kdo.render-project.eu/kdo declares that it imports it
Actually http://semanticweb.org/ontologies/ itself is 404

http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/semanticportal/OWL/Documentation_Ontology.owlis
404
although http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/projects/semdis/opus# declares many
mappings to it

http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/misc is 404
although it is used by http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/ontology

And that's only what I can quickly discover using the results provided by
the LOV bot which explores the Linked Open Vocabularies space.

What is the bottom line of this? Data and vocabularies publishers take for
granted that published vocabularies can be re-used at will and rely on
them. But when a re-used vocabulary goes off-line, not only we have 404 in
the linked data web, but semantics of dependent vocabularies is affected.

semanticweb.org is just an example. Unfortunately it's not the only one. It
seems that vocabulary publishers are often not aware of their long-term
responsibility. We have in the LOV project even had answers from some
people mentioned as vocabulary creators who were not even aware that their
vocabulary was actually still used ...

But given its singular place in the semantic web space, one could think
that semanticweb.org should show off good practices ...

Best

Bernard

2012/1/12 Markus Krötzsch <markus.kroetzsch@cs.ox.ac.uk>

> Hi Yuri,
>
> let us take this to one mailing list semantic-web@w3.org, as this is the
> list that is most involved (please drop the others when you reply).
>
> As the technical maintainer of the site, I largely agree with your
> assessment. In spite of the very high visibility of the site (and perceived
> authority), the active editing community is not big. This is a problem
> especially given the significant and continued spam attacks that the site
> is under due to its high visibility (I just recently changed the captcha
> system and rolled back thousands of edits, yet it seems they are already
> breaking through again, though in smaller numbers).
>
> I do not want to blame anybody for the state of affairs: most of us do not
> have the time to contribute significant content to such sites. However,
> given the extraordinary visibility of the site, we should all perceive this
> as a major problem (to the extent that we attach our work to the label
> "semantic web" in any way).
>
> So what can be done?
>
> (1) Freeze the wiki. A weaker version of this is: allow users only to edit
> after they were manually added to a group of trusted users (all humans
> welcome). This would require somebody to manage these permissions but would
> allow existing projects/communities to continue to use the site.
>
> (2) Re-enforce spam protection on the wiki. Maybe this could be done, but
> the site is targeted pretty heavily. Standard captchas like ReCaptcha are
> thus getting broken (spammers do have an effective infrastructure for
> this), but maybe non-standard captchas could work better. This is a task
> for the technical maintainers (i.e., me and the folks at AIFB Karlsruhe
> where the site is hosted).
>
> (3) Clean the wiki. Whether frozen or not, there is a lot of spam already.
> Something needs to be done to get rid of it. This requires (easy but
> tedious) manual effort. Some stakeholders need to be found to provide basic
> workforce (e.g., by hiring a student to help with spam deletion).
>
> (4) Restore the wiki. Update the main pages (about technologies and active
> projects) to reflect a current and/or timeless state that we would like new
> readers to see. This again needs somebody to push it, and for writing pages
> about topics like SPARQL one would need some expertise. This is a challenge
> for the community.
>
> I am willing to invest /some/ time here to help with the above, but (3)
> and (4) requires support from more people. On the other hand, there are
> probably hardly more than 20 or 30 *essential* content pages that we are
> talking about here, plus many pages about projects and people that one
> should ask the stakeholders to review. So one might be able to make this
> into a shining entry point to the semantic web in a week of work ...
> together with (1) and (2) above, the invested work would remain valuable
> for a long time.
>
> Cheers
>
> Markus
>
>
>
>
> On 12/01/12 10:43, Yury Katkov wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> What is the current status of the semanticweb.org
>> <http://semanticweb.org> website? It used to be the main wiki about the
>>
>> semantic web, it has a lot of cool and useful information about
>> everything. But now it seems abandoned. I mean, there are about 30 real
>> writers who update the information about their projects an write
>> articles, but they do something like 30% of changes. The other 70% is
>> spam!
>>
>> Are there guys who support the website?
>> Who manages the community, are there any plans of creating projects and
>> articles about SW? Is there community at all?
>>
>> In my opinion if this great website suppose to be alive the first goal
>> is to find volunteers who'll help administrator to combat spam (with
>> bots, extensions and editing policies) and support the new activities
>> and projets on the wiki. (I'm ready to be one of them).
>> If this wiki lived only in the past when it was a big hype around
>> Semantic Web topics and now without a big funding nobody wants to use it
>> - wouldn't it better to be frozen?
>>
>> I appreciate and admire people who started up the wiki. Please, don't
>> let it be the rotting memorial to the past of the Semantic Web.
>> -----
>> Sincerely yours,
>> Yury Katkov, WikiVote llc
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Dr. Markus Kroetzsch
> Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
> Room 306, Parks Road, OX1 3QD Oxford, United Kingdom
> +44 (0)1865 283529               http://korrekt.org/
>
>


-- 
*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>

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