Hi, Stanbol folks! I'm writing to you on behalf of the community of Fedora Commons (http://fedora-commons.org). Fedora is an information architecture with open source reference implementation that has come into wide use over the last fifteen years in the "cultural heritage" world of libraries, archives, museums, etc. For many years, we've been intensely concerned with the ideas that go under the loose label of "the Semantic Web". In fact, the latest edition of Fedora is an Linked Data Platform implementation, amongst other things.
Several institutions using Fedora are also using Stanbol for various tasks (supporting OpenRefine, metadata entity management, NER, etc.), and some discussion has occurred about its state and future potential. It's not totally clear to us what kind of development community and commitment therefrom currently exists. There has been discussion about a 1.0 release of Stanbol, but there doesn't seem to be much other activity in the codebase, with very few of the listed committers making commits. We were wondering if it is possible to get a better sense of the near-mid-term future of the project. Is there a road map beyond the 1.0 release? Is Stanbol seeking new developers? What kinds of resources are missing to put more vitality back into Stanbol? It's an excellent project filled with great ideas and we'd like to see it move forward. We'd be happy to get together for a telephone call / Google Hangout / other meeting, if that seems useful! --- A. Soroka The University of Virginia Library
