Re: Where has the FOAF spec gone ?

Hey Thomas,

yes, you're right, it’s really bad, that popular, often used ontologies
tend to become unavailable every now and then, for multiple reasons.

More subtle, much harder to detect but equally annoying are smaller or
bigger edits applied to these ontologies we all rely on in our
applications, often without any kind of public notification.

Finally to arrive at reliability, persistence and reproducibility along the
lifecycle of ontologies and ontology-driven applications, we have developed
the open source infrastructure Plow [1].

Plow is an ontology registry and package manager that provides version
resolution and dependency management.

In case the raw ontology file might help you, you can find our mirror of
the most recent version of FOAF we’ve been able to find, at
https://registry.field33.com/field/@foaf_mirror/foaf/0.99.0

Regarding your question about the specification, I think we should discuss
if we continue mirroring specification documents or if they shouldn’t
be assumed to be an inherent part of the actual ontology, i.e., as an
ontology package that contains the ontology and its
documentation/specification using comments.

Through this mechanism we can produce auto-generated documentations:
https://registry.field33.com/field/@foaf_mirror/foaf/0.99.0/docs

Best,
Sebastian + Team Field 33 & Plow


[1] https://ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticle/60717

On Fri 23. Dec 2022 at 03:35, Tom Morris <tfmorris@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 11:34 AM Thomas Francart <thomas.francart@sparna.fr>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ redirects to an old, 2004 version of the
>> spec, since at least a couple of months.
>>
>> This is bad signal. Can anyone please restore the current version ? I
>> imagine it has been archived somewhere ?
>>
>
> Of course there's always
> https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
>
> Tom
>