Re: [ANN] VoCol: A Git-based Environment for Collaborative Vocabulary Development

This looks great!

I have found that GitHub and the GitHub ecosystem work really well for 
ontology development. This isn't surprising, given that a lot of 
software lifecycle paradigms transfer well to ontology development: unit 
and integration tests executed within a continuous integration system, 
"compiling" an ontology using reasoners, etc.

One drawback is that the generic GitHub/Travis/etc interface is more 
optimized for coder-types and can be intimidating for some less 
technical users. Your environment looks like it will be a welcome layer 
on top of this ecosystem, providing a more user-friendly and 
ontology-aware view.

It looks like your default set of interfaces are geared more towards 
smaller "semweb-style" vocabs rather than (for example) large biological 
ontologies featuring extensive OWL axiomatization. Of course, the proof 
of principle is there, and I imagine some of the default viewing 
components could be swapped out for other ones.

Having a turtle editor that is integrated with GitHub is a great idea - 
I've proposed this for WebProtege: 
https://github.com/protegeproject/webprotege/issues/284

Nice work!


On 2 Dec 2015, at 5:07, Lavdim Halilaj wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> we are happy to announce the release of VoCol: a Git-based environment 
> for collaborative vocabulary development.
>
> - VoCol offers several features that support collaborative vocabulary 
> development with Git;
> - It works on top of Git and with repository services like GitHub, 
> Gitlab and BitBucket;
> - Users do not need to install VoCol, since it is hosted on a central 
> server;
> - It is independent of the actual Git repository, i.e., it can be 
> activated and configured without affecting the repository.
>
> The following services are currently integrated into VoCol (and are 
> automatically executed with every push event):
> - Syntax validation with Rapper and Jena Riot (also executed with 
> every pre-commit event);
> - Documentation generation with Schema.org and Widoco;
> - Visualization with WebVOWL;
> - SPARQL endpoint querying with Jena Fuseki;
> - Evolution report with OWL2VCS.
>
> All services can be (de-)activated in the VoCol settings, and other 
> tools and services can be added as extensions.
>
> Additional features of VoCol include dereferenceable URIs, content 
> negotiation, support of branches, etc.
>
> An online demo is available at: http://butterbur06.iai.uni-bonn.de
> An example of the configuration page can be accessed at: 
> http://butterbur06.iai.uni-bonn.de/docs/configuration_page.html
>
> We also provide a Vagrant Box, which you can download and run. With 
> the Vagrant Share mechanism, every generated artifact is publicly 
> accessible (while hosted on your machine).
>
> More information about VoCol can be found on GitHub at: 
> https://github.com/vocol/vocol
>
> We created a survey to collect feedback on VoCol, and would kindly ask 
> you to participate: https://goo.gl/tfykpS
>
>
> Best Regards,
> ___________________________
> Lavdim Halilaj, PhD Student
> Organized Knowledge Group, Fraunhofer IAIS
> Enterprise Information Systems Group, University of Bonn.

Received on Friday, 4 December 2015 02:54:10 UTC