Hi there,
Okay, in order to keep this alive, I compiled a collection of the
documentation that I have created related to Stanbol. I am sending
this attached to this email as a zip file. If there is a better way to
do it, just reply and tell me what it is.
Some parts of the documentation are just an expansion on the official
docs, so a lot of it will be repeated, just worded differently or with
some extra thing that I found useful.
To complement this, I have some specific questions about where stanbol
is moving towards and I'd like to welcome anyone that know the answer
to any of them to reply to the email.
What's the role of the Sesame Yard?
The reason why I ask this is because I was able to configure a
kiwi repository in a marmotta instance and register it in stanbol as a
remote Sesame Yard, but unlike the Solr yard, there seems to be no way
of connecting this to an engine and put it on an enhancement chain.
Doing this would allow greater flexibility as one could use marmotta
as a remote triplestore. Is this implemented? Is it meant to work in a
different way?
What is the current version of Solr bundled with Stanbol, and are we
planning on moving on to some more recent version?
What is the status of connecting to a remote Solr instance?
Stanbol already uses Solr in an embedded way so from an abstract
perspective, it shouldn't be too hard to just plug it in to a remote
instance of Solr possibly running in a different server. The
advantages of this would be obviously the decoupling of function and
storage, more flexibility and control over the Solr instance (i.e
applying a visualisation layer like banana
<https://github.com/lucidworks/banana> on it), but also an easier
route to connect directly to the solr instance which I don't know how
everyone else sees it, but I see it as just having more flexibility.
What's both the current role and the "proposed" role of ontonet?
Is it supposed to define a namespace globally? For example, if I
define an ontology in ontonet, I don't need to worry about defining it
when I create a new custom vocabulary and I can just use it in the raw
RDF data?
How far are we from accepting form data POST requests to the enhancer?
Frameworks and libraries like Express.js for node.js are
deprecating the use of raw POST requests in favour of form data POST
requests, is this something Stanbol will want to at least support?
Sorry for this huge dump of information, but these are just some
things that have been on my mind for quite a while and this seemed
like the best timing for sharing them with the community. As I said
before, feel free to comment on those if you know any answers,
criticize my lack of research if anything I ask has been said
somewhere by someone before and comment on the documentation I am
providing (especially the places where I ask for help).
Best Regards,
Antero
On Fri, 20 May 2016 at 23:06 Stefano Cossu <sco...@artic.edu
<mailto:sco...@artic.edu>> wrote:
Hello,
Great to see so much feedback. As A. Soroka mentioned, some Fedora
adopters are already using Stanbol or looking into it. We at the
Art Insitute of Chicago fall in the latter category.
Reading and understanding the documentation has been tough indeed.
I have some use cases and I have been trying to figure out whether
Stanbol is a good fit for them, but I cannot match what I read in
the docs with what I have in my running Stanbol instance (for
example, where is the content hub?). Also, without a reasonably
regular release schedule or a 1.x release available, it is hard to
rely on Stanbol for tasks beyond experimental or ancillary.
With a massive introduction of Linked Data concepts in the latest
version of Fedora I foresee it being just a matter of time until
more folks will start looking at something to resolve semantic
integration issues. If that is Stanbol's goal, it would be great
to rely on a community project rather than on individual
implementations.
The AIC has very limited developer resources, but we may be able
to contribute with use cases, ideas, testing, and spreading the
word; and I am sure that if enough awareness arises, more
contribution may come from other sides.
Thanks,
Stefano
On 05/20/2016 06:34 AM, Antero Duarte wrote:
Hi,
I will gather all the documentation I have, create some comments
on what I don't really understand and essentially got to work on
a trial-error basis and then I will send these to everyone. I
will also outline in the same email some features I don't
understand, some features that I think are useful but don't know
how to configure/ not sure if they are actually fully implemented
and a list of items that I came across that no longer apply/are
deprecated.
Regards,
Antero
On Fri, 20 May 2016 at 11:39 Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org
<mailto:rh...@apache.org>> wrote:
HI Antero,
On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte
<a.fduar...@gmail.com <mailto:a.fduar...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Stanbol is great and I would hate to see it die.
>
Couldn't be more agree!
>
> 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).
>
That's true again imho. Also Development documentation, not
only final user
one is needed. And probably some work on making the APIs more
comprehensible.
>
> 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.
>
Please share, for sure we can all take benefit from it and
improve the
documentation
>
> 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.
>
+1. It would be great to have also concrete examples about
what features,
components and son on are not clear enough or just deprecated
in the
current live documentation so we can start by those
Thanks a lot!
>
> My two cents.
>
> Best Regards,
> Antero Duarte
>
> On Fri, 20 May 2016 at 10:26 Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org
<mailto: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 <mailto: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
> > >
> > >
> >
>
--
Stefano Cossu
Director of Application Services, Collections
The Art Institute of Chicago
116 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603
312-499-4026
