[Xesam] oscaf/xesam ontology merge: who is going to maintain/edit what?

[Antoni Mylka]

Hello Xesamies (Xesams, Xesamians, is there an accepted form? ),

I'm Antoni Mylka, I coordinated the NIE work in the original Nepomuk.
Right now I maintain the Aperture project. I'm supported by DFKI and Aduna.

Right now the "build" of the ontologies looks like this:

1. All NIE ontologies and all ontologies they depend on (i.e. those
reused like DC, EXIF etc.) are placed in one folder. Currently [1].
These are the actual source files. Everything else is automatically
generated. Each ontology has three files - the RDFS file with classes,
the RDF file with instances and a Protege project file.

2. All RDF files in the 'output' [1] directory are processed with an ant
script [2] that does the following things:
 - converts the constructs for protege namespace (like InverseProperty)
   to their equivalents in the NRL namespace
 - generates the proper RDF/XML and Trig Serializations
 - generates the Metadata Graphs
 - generates the html code for the documentation (i.e. generates those
   html tables with the descriptions of each class and ontology, and
   concatenates it with the text stored in 'htmlinformal' folder [3]

3. There is a second script [4] that updates the 'ontologies-public'
folder [5], which is then examined with a cron job and updated to the
actual web server that server the www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies.

The basic idea of getting automated validation of example files, is
based on the "NRL Validator" [6] a tool developed within Nepomuk that
takes a portion of RDF data and tests if it's valid against a given set
of ontologies. By "valid" we mean
 - the test dataset doesn't contain any classes or properties not
   defined in the given set of ontologies
 - all domain, range and cardinality constraints are met i.e.
   if we have a property nie:isInterpretedAs which has a domain of
   nie:DataObject and range of nie:InformationElement, if
   (a nie:isInterpretedAs b) occurs in the test data, then there
   must also be (a rdf:type c1) and (b rdf:type c2) where
   c1 is some subclass of nie:DataObject and c2 is some subclass
   of nie:InformationElement.

I volunteer for:
 - moving the current ontology source files to whatever repository is
   chosen, both the trunk and the 8 'revisions' already 'released'
 - dropping the legacy constraint that the ontologies must be editable
   in Protege, which didn't work anyway, and make the protege->NRL
   conversion step unnecessary
 - moving the doc generator to whatever repository is chosen
 - setting up the "build" so that with a single call to 'ant' the
   documentation will be regenerated and all example files will be
   validated against the current version of the ontology
 - spearheading the effort to get some export of the trac history from
   the nepomuk trac and importing it to whatever issue tracker is chosen
   (I personally favour trac, dunno how difficult it would be to
   import trac issues to bugzilla - all kinds of comments welcome).
 - maintaining the 'build' code infrastructure
 - helping all other ontology maintainers as far as I can
 - maintaining all the ontology parts for which no separate maintainer
   steps up. I've been reading through the thread and it seems there
   were two people willing to take on the maintenance duties.
   NRL -
   NAO -
   NIE -
   NFO - Ivan Frade
   NMO - Roberto Guido
   NCO -
   NCAL -
   NEXIF -
   NID3 -

Dunno if the original authors of NRL (as stated at [7]) will want to get
involved with it now. It seems that the number of volunteers is far from
astonishing ATM :). I know that Evgeny and Sebastian have did quite a
lot of work with this stuff.

All kinds of comments welcome

Antoni Mylka
antoni.mylka at gmail.com

[1] http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/repos/trunk/ontologies/nie/output
[2]
https://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/repos/trunk/ontologies/nie/generate-nie-html-docs.xml
[3]
https://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/repos/trunk/ontologies/nie/htmlinformal
[4]
https://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/repos/trunk/ontologies/nie/update-ontologies-public.xml
[5]
https://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/repos/trunk/ontologies-public
[6]
https://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/repos/trunk/java/org.semanticdesktop.nepomuk.nrl.validator
[7]
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/08/15/nrl/