Elisa (01)
stewardship is indeed important, but it cannot be seen separately from
architecture, or from organisational aspect, or funding (02)
all of these things end up being interdependent in any project (03)
to pay someone to be a stewart for an ontology can end up being very
expensive, students will lose interest when they finish their studies,
researchers will only do so when paid and will stop doing so when the
funding runs out, to find funding it is necessary to have an
organisation, which require administrators, which require managers etc
etc - bureaucracy, potential inefficiency (04)
there are loadsa lovely projects on the web including ontoportal
started with similar aims, and abandoned. plenty of skeletons and
ghostships floating around. any wise investor will see the risks of
potentialy wasting resources (05)
a good stewart will want to have say in the architecture, and may not
agree with another stewart etc (06)
a possible solution would be to identify people who are already
inherently motivated to develop and maintain some ontology, for
example
JS could maintain the ontology of lattices, he would do so because he
really loves lattices and knows a lot about them, and he should do so
where and how he is comfortable doing so, and other experts could do
the same in their respective fields, (07)
no money could ever pay for such contributions, and anyone could
benefit by importing and manipulating the ontology to suit their
purpose, and where appropriate, redistributing as it happens with
creative commons (08)
an LOD approach would help to navigate and use these ontologies as
specified by individual user requirements, without impacting the
independence of the resources (09)
such an approach does not require an organisation, no funding *any
person or organisation can create an ontology and distribute it free
of charge), just coordination and commitment of individual
stakeholders (010)
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:20 AM, Elisa Kendall <ekendall@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Thanks Elisa for further points
>> indeed
>> It looks to me that what you describe below, fits the requirement for
>> one customer, or one class of customers. I do not exclude that
>> particular requirement you outline below can be bet with a repository,
>> as it can be met with a schema which produces the desired
>> functionality irrespective of where the ontology resides.
>>
> The more important issue I think is one of stewardship -- irrespective
> of where ontologies "reside" from a linked data perspective, one would
> hope that there is a community of interest that is responsible for
> evolving and managing that ontology in a way that others can depend on.
> If an ontology or vocabulary is defined through a standards body, then
> it should be published by that standards body and evolve through their
> processes in such a way that its users understand how and when it will
> change.
>
> "How" an ontology is published - on some public web server, through a
> virtual repository (which may or may not be implemented through
> traditional database technology), or otherwise - is only one of a number
> of issues that the should be addressed by Ontolog's open ontology
> repository initiative, in other words. And yes, I agree wholeheartedly
> that identification of a user community and development of use cases are
> essential.
>> If this project has to serve the requirement of your customers, that's
>> a different story
>>
>> But if this project must serve 'universal' requirements, including the
>> ones that have not yet been specified, of unknown users, then the LOD
>> concept is the most open, cause it allows any operation to be carried
>> out at any level, as defined at query/resoner level
>>
> Perhaps, but the "implementation strategy" for publication, which could
> include an LOD-compatible approach, is less important than the
> stewardship and management process, regardless of who publishes it.
>> >From what I understand, an LOD based systems can also combine data (an
>> ontology) stored in different types of repositories and in different
>> locations, and I cannot see any limit to the functionality that can be
>> developed on top of it
>>
>> The key notion is 'distributed', which contrasts with centralized.
>> The 'centralization' of a distributed environment is done at schema level/
>>
> Here is where I believe that the use cases will be critical. Every
> ontology published and managed by this group, in order to be useful to a
> community of interest, needs a steward, and maintenance policies should
> be clear to anyone who might depend on it. Otherwise, we will publish
> lots of ontologies that very few people will ever use.
>> Of course there are issues, but users, say OMG customers, can always
>> freeze some bits of it and place whatever they want behind a wall and
>> control it as per their organisational model. Nothing would prevent
>> anyone from doing such a thing
>>
> Change management policies are critical for broad adoption, though.
> People really do need to know that their application will continue to
> work properly even though someone else on a distant island has changed
> the ontology it is based on, or at a minimum, they should be able to
> continue to use the older version and be able to make that choice
> actively. This is a much deeper issue than the implementation strategy
> to publish the ontology in my view. Examples include Dublin Core, SKOS,
> FOAF, and a few others ... including the FinnOnto project in Finland
> (http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/finnonto/). In each case, you find a
> small community of developers who are dedicated to supporting a much
> broader user community -- including publishing their maintenance
> policies, inviting user feedback, actually responding to that feedback,
> etc. Any effort sponsored by Ontolog needs to take these issues into
> consideration, which could be compatible with an LOD approach, but it
> needs careful thought.
>> It goes without saying that best practices and standards, where
>> available, have to applied in either case.
>>
>> The repository as it is being discussed here, from what I understood
>> of it, is an enhanced database, somehow ontology repository can become
>> a bit of an oxymoron, if we consider the context of the open web.
>>
>> Requirements of individual customers are very different from universal
>> requirements of wider groups of web users.
>>
>> So maybe one step forward in this debate is identifying the intended
>> users of this system that Ontolog is trying to satisfy (other than OMG
>> customers), .....
>>
>>
>> :-)
>>
> Absolutely.
>
> Elisa
>
> ...<snip>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
> To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> (011)
--
Paola Di Maio (012)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (013)
|