The main things I find valuable in Stanbol are the entity extraction from text via the REST API, and the EntityHub. I use Stanbol embedded in a larger project that works with text documents, and sends each document to Stanbol via the REST interface to get the associated triples. The 'EntityHub is nice for when you want to store entities that are specific to your organization, instead of just being able to link to things that are in DBPedia or whatever.
I never had much use for the triple storage and SPARQL query stuff, because I already use Jena / Fuseki fo that part. But for getting the triples for the text, Stanbol is great. I don't know if anybody who worked on this project before is interested in working on an "outside Apache" fork, or if there already is one. But I've created one under my organization on Github if anybody is interested. Tentative working name is "Semantic Objects". https://github.com/fogbeam/semantic-objects In the next day or two I'm going to look at pulling over the Jira issues into Github, and see about getting a mailing list setup, and maybe an instance of Gitter or Mattermost for discussions. If anybody is interested, feel free to drop me a note. Or if there's activity elsewhere already, please let me know. Phil
