<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi folks, OSCAF is not just the name of the project, there is another good angle about it. OSCAF is a legal body you can join to legally manage the ontologies. At the end of the project, the ownership of the NEPOMUK ontologies has moved to OSCAF, we founded that Organisation (KDE, DFKI, DERI are members) so that it can continue the ontologies since the NEPOMUK project does not exist anymore as legal entity. Some of you may not know - the NEPOMUK ontologies were originally written by a consortium of 16 companies, sponsored by the EU, and published under an open source/cc license. OSCAF is very handy for now, because otherwise some re-licensing issues would have to be thought out with those16 companies (where one already stopped existing). I guess if it keeps the copyright now, it could much easier to relicense the ontologies later if the current CC-BY is a problem (which, usually, it is, after some years, when the legal things move on to new licenses, as just happens to wikipedia) Maybe I am overreacting here, usually nobody asks "who has the copyright on this ontology", but only look at the licenses (which can only be changed by the owner) perhaps only big organisations such as Eclipse.org care about such things. Also, OSCAF has some money backing, my employer DFKI and the other org members have sponsored some funds for OSCAF, which we could use to host the website or sponsor something else. I can't say much about this, because I am not in charge alone here, but it is an aspect. If this is needed now, we can add some (all?) of you (maybe even freedesktop.org, if it is a legal entity) as OSCAF "individual members" and create a low-fuzz "just do it" policy for managing the ontologies. You would also get a voting right on important decisions, etc, but it is not mandatory to do all this. I would guess given the circumstances that this will be doable quickly. It has the advantage of having a legal body behind for the publishing of the ontologies, similar to apache or eclipse or w3c or oasis. Also, the ontologies are used beyond KDE, by Nokia in MAEMO and in my own products of gnowsis.com, so personally, I would think a legal neutral standardization body could help to keep all these partners happy. If this is not the case, if OSCAF as legal body is not wanted here, then please say so, I think then the ontologies can be edited by anyone under the current licensing terms (but never relicensed). my 2c, best Leo It was Arun Raghavan who said at the right time 04.05.2009 21:30 the following words: <blockquote cite="mid:6f8b45100905041230h26cb4304m71f5f6fe406bf3d6@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">2009/5/4 Sebastian Trüg <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:trueg@kde.org"><trueg@kde.org></a>: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Hi guys, maybe you read my blog about Xesam and Nepomuk[1]. In essence I think we should create a new project which will handle the maintenance of the desktop ontologies. So far for me this means the Nepomuk ontologies NAO, NIE, and PIMO. IMHO it makes perfect sense to have a dedicated project for several reasons:  * no copies floating around in different project packages  * one standard that we agree on (I know this is hard)  * one platform for discussion/bugs and general maintenance  * One central ontologies package very much like the mimetype package </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> This sounds perfect. </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">I mentioned in my blog that we already created the OSCAF sourceforge project[2]. Now I don't really care how we name the project. Maybe OSCAF is not the best name, maybe something very simple like "desktop-ontologies" would </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> I would say that we should reuse one of Xesam or Nepomuk for this. Why add one more buzz-word to an already crowded namespace? :) Besides, it makes it easier to associate the ontology with the project, then. </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">be better. In any case I think using sourceforce (I prefer it since I already have 3 projects there and was always happy with it) or something similar is a good idea. We then don't need to spend time on setting up task tracking systems or mailing lists. We just use what is there. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> _If_ we agree to keep this effort under the head of Nepomuk or Xesam, I guess we can just reuse the existing infrastructure? Thanks for taking the initiative on this -- I think it'd be great if we could all quickly converge on how we want to proceed from here, and get the ball rolling. Cheers, </pre> </blockquote> <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- ____________________________________________________ DI Leo Sauermann <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann">http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann</a> Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz DFKI GmbH Trippstadter Strasse 122 P.O. Box 2080 Fon: +49 631 20575-116 D-67663 Kaiserslautern Fax: +49 631 20575-102 Germany Mail: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:leo.sauermann@dfki.de">leo.sauermann@dfki.de</a> Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof.Dr.Dr.h.c.mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender) Dr. Walter Olthoff Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313 ____________________________________________________ </pre> </body> </html>