[CFC] Call For Curators for Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV)

Dear colleagues,

Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) is a curated ontology index that allows
searching for ontologies and ontology terms. This portal gathers and makes
visible indicators such as interconnection between vocabularies, version
history, use of the vocabulary terms in datasets, etc.

Led by Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche and Bernard Vatant, LOV started in March
2011 as part of the DataLift research project [2] being developed and
launched by Mondeca [3]. It was rapidly seen as a valuable resource for the
open knowledge and semantic web communities and the Open Knowledge
Foundation offered its servers and maintenance from July 2012 (thanks to
Rufus Pollock, Paul Walsh and the OKFN admins) until July 2018, when it
started being hosted by the Ontology Engineering Group at Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid.

There is no doubt that LOV has been a success for the ontology engineering
and semantic web community, as you may know either because you use it on a
regular basis, contribute to it or have heard about it, or because of the
more than 22,000 accesses accounted during the last year.

Currently LOV indexes curated metadata from more than 600 ontologies,
thanks to a community effort supported by a crew of curators contributing
on a voluntary basis: Bernard Vatant
<https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/agents/Bernard%20Vatant>
(former), Pierre-Yves
Vandenbussche
<https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/agents/Pierre-Yves%20Vandenbussche>,
Ghislain Atemezing, Alba Fernández Izquierdo
<https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/agents/Alba%20Fern%C3%A1ndez%20Izquierdo>,
Gabriel Kepeklian, Paola Espinoza Arias and myself.

We would like to keep the system maintained for and by the community, for
what we are opening the curation process to interested collaborators.

We plan to select a small set of curators to start with and see how the
curation process works in a more distributed team and which problems we
encounter during the curation processes, then expanding to a bigger group.
If you are interested in joining our team of curators, just fill in the
form http://bit.ly/LOVcurators or reply to this email with your name, your
organisation, why are you interested in contributing, and your experience
in ontological engineering and/or ontology curation. Everybody is welcome.

Looking forward to your expressions of interest,

María Poveda-Villalón on behalf of the LOV team


PS: No need to say that your contributions will be publicly acknowledged on
the LOV site, although we know that making sure that this community effort
continues being successful over the next years will be the most valuable
reward that you will get.

[1] https://lov.linkeddata.es/

[2] https://datalift.org/ontologies/
[3] https://mondeca.com/


-- 
María Poveda Villalón, PhD

Ontology Engineering Group (OEG)
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Madrid, Spain

e-mail: mpoveda@fi.upm.es
blog: http://thepetiteontologist.wordpress.com/
tlf: +34 910672889