Hi there, Stanbol is great and I would hate to see it die.
About the lack of feedback from users/developers, I can only say that it took quite a while for me to be able to reply to someone on this mailing list because the learning curve is so steep. I bet a lot of people still read and are interested in stanbol updates, but they just don't have the technical know-how to be involved. I include myself in this group, I have answered a couple of questions, but only really basic ones, as I fear my knowledge of the platform as a whole doesn't allow me to answer more complicated questions. I think one step that definitely needs to be taken is improving/updating the existing documentation. I know for a fact that one thing that really put me off when I first started using stanbol was the that there was documentation that was unclear, examples that were unable to be reproduced for several reasons, and outdated documents that referenced components that no longer existed in the latest stable release of stanbol (I'm not even talking about the latest build from trunk). I have a couple of documents that I have written over time that made it easier for me to understand how stanbol works and I could share these but they would need to be reviewed by someone who understands stanbol a lot better than me. I understand that you have busy lives and as developers, you'd rather use the little time you have to code than to write documentation, but if we can make stanbol more approachable to newcomers, I believe the developer pool would increase greatly and we could make Stanbol great again. My two cents. Best Regards, Antero Duarte On Fri, 20 May 2016 at 10:26 Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi Soroka, > > First of all, reading this kind of emails is, in my opinion, a cause of > happiness as a new attempt to somehow reactivate the project. I share the > same feeling about Apache Stanbol since sometime ago. More than one month > ago, there was a Google Hangout meeting joined by some committers and also > users. We tried to sketch an immediate roadmap and planned to release > version 1.0 in the following weeks after that meeting. We sent an email to > the list with the meeting minutes, but after that there was a lot of > silence again. > > Probably the main problem right now is probably the lack of quality time to > dedicate to the project for the current active committers. I can only speak > for myself: in my particular case, in the last year I have used Stanbol for > a couple of projects, we developed a couple of custom engines that we can > prepare for contribution, but we never found the proper time to do this, > among other things because we didn't have clear if those engines could be > useful for the community. And that is probably another symptom, we have > been progressively losing feedback from users, developers....community: > there are less and less messages in the mailing list every month. This > scenario is probably not too much motivating for aiming contributions and > finding new committers. There are probably more reasons, like Stanbol is > not technically very friendly to be approached. > > Of course I'm not saying this situation is someone fault. I'm not very sure > about the best recipe for improving the situation either. > > Thoughts? > > On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 5:49 PM A. Soroka <aj...@virginia.edu> wrote: > > > 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 > > > > >
