Re: A certain difficulty

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
 > >Should Protégé be seen as an instrument of renormalization shedding light
 > on
 > >the processes of serializing conceptuality or as the FrontPage of RDF?
 >
 > That all depends on whether it gravitates to a community consensus and a
 > weblike
 > way of working - with community feedback and source code - or whether it is
 > an output-only project! ;-)  So far, things are looking good as seen from a
 > gret distance.

Tim,

I'm not sure if the "it" in this sentence refers to Protege or not.  "It" 
seems to.  If so, I'd like to emphasize a couple of points we brought up 
earlier. Protege is already open source (under the terms of the Mozilla 
public license) and the source code is installed with every version (it's 
in the "source" subdirectory of the installation).

We actively encourage feedback and we already have a fairly large and 
reasonably active user community from our "pre-RDF" days.  We are very 
grateful to everyone who gave us feedback after we released the RDF version 
of Protege and we incorporated many suggestions in the subsequent release. 
We really hope to continue working with the RDF user community to make 
Protege as useful for RDF editing as possible.

For those of you who are interested, we also have a separate mailing list 
for specifically protege-related discussion (subscription instructions are 
on our download page at 
http://www.smi.stanford.edu/projects/protege/protege-2000/download.html).

We are also open to contributions of source code both in the form of 
additions to the core Protege code and in the form of plug-ins. (See the 
Protege documentation on what the plugins are and how to write Protege 
plugins.  The RDF backend is one example of a protege plugin.) As this 
is our first experience with releasing an application as open-source 
code, we don't have a well-established process for incorporating code from 
users and for now we will deal with it on a case-by-case basis. When this 
process breaks, we will come up with a new one.

Ray

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 18:24:27 UTC