[Xesam] An open-source project for desktop ontology maintenance

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

The more I look at it the more I like it:

Ontologies can be avialable as a separate package in distributions. We could 
agree to install it to some app-/environment-neutral place.

We can have a git repo with a master branch and branches that exchange patches 
with kde and gnome repos. This way we can tap into translation infrastructure 
of both projects.
Also we could have a nepomuk-stable branch as well to see just how far away we 
have drifted etc.

So now ontology format and location needs to be determined. Anything standard 
like rdf/xml, turtle etc is fine by me.

As to location of the repository. It's small so can be migrated in several 
minutes and we can expect that no significant number of people are going to 
start pulling our repo right away. So github&co will work just fine for now.

On 5 мая 2009 22:15:10 Sebastian Trüg wrote:
> OK, I am convinced.
> I only want to say that my idea of a desktop ontologies package would also
> include installing ontologies such as RDF, RDFS, NAO, NRL, and PIMO.
> Basically all ontologies desktop applications need.
>
> But maybe that is no problem at all...
>
> Cheers,
> Sebastian
>
> On Tuesday 05 May 2009 18:32:15 Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-05-05 at 18:49 +0300, Ivan Frade wrote:
> > > Hi
> > >
> > >  Why not...
> > >
> > > * XESAM open source project that maintains three pieces
> > >   - An ontology (based on nepomuk [keeping names etc.], community
> >
> >       driven).
> >
> > >   - An API for client applications (give it a proper name)
> > >   - A query language (very probably sparQL)
> > >
> > >  This makes happy the people in KDE, GNOME, freedesktop and open
> > > source fans. It is simple and understandable. Am i missing anything?
> >
> > No you are not. I think some other people might be missing things :)
> >
> > Hasn't that always been what Xesam 2.0 is (going to be) about?
> >
> >
> > Now apparently there's a request to have a more community driven project
> > structure for Xesam 2.0. Which means that for the ontology we need:
> >
> > - A git repository with some accounts for some people
> >
> > - A format (I'm assuming .trig or .ttl is perfect for this)
> >
> > - Scripts for generating the website out of the git repository
> >
> > - A bug tracker so that we can irritate each other with bugs. Preferably
> >   a bug tracker that is actually good (at enabling us to irritate each
> >   other). Not just a @#*& trac website.
> >
> > - A procedure that we agree with Nepomuk upstream to get our Xesam 2.0
> >   ontology requirements into upstream Nepomuk. If Nepomuk upstream wants
> >   this, of course. Else we just fork it. But apparently nobody at
> >   Nepomuk is against letting Xesam 2.0 use Nepomuk, or against letting
> >   Xesam 2.0's people help define improvements to upstream Nepomuk?
> >
> >   That's great. I mean, then let's just make some agreements on how we
> >   communicate change requests to Nepomuk upstream?!
> >
> >   What is certain is that several projects, like Tracker, need a very
> >   fast response time for their ontology changes. Which means < than a
> >   week. I assume upstream Nepomuk wants to take a more restricted
> >   approach and wants us to prove that our experiments work before
> >   accepting said ontology changes?
> >
> > I personally hope that some time in future we'll just have a package
> > called "nepomuk-ontology-VERSION.tar.gz" instead of the directory that
> > we are shipping as part of the Tracker package [1]. Note that we have a
> > few requirements like having a load-order in the filename (much like
> > rc.d directories work). But nothing that we can't easily agree on.
> >
> >
> > Which means that for the DBus API we need:
> >
> > - Unit tests
> >
> > - The introspection XML in above mentioned git repo
> >
> > - Documentation
> >
> > And for the query language I don't think we need anything specific in
> > the repository. Except maybe the SPARQL and SPARQL UPDATE specifications
> > as part of the documentation.
> >
> >
> > [1] http://git.gnome.org/cgit/tracker/tree/data/ontologies
> >
> >
> > Looking at the list above, for example freedesktop.org provides all what
> > we need. We just need to ask. Right?
>
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