Hi folks,
OSCAF is not just the name of the project, there is another good angle
about it.
OSCAF is a legal body you can join to legally manage the ontologies.
At the end of the project, the ownership of the NEPOMUK ontologies has
moved to OSCAF,
we founded that Organisation (KDE, DFKI, DERI are members) so that it
can continue the
ontologies since the NEPOMUK project does not exist anymore as legal entity.
Some of you may not know - the NEPOMUK ontologies were originally
written by
a consortium of 16 companies, sponsored by the EU, and published under
an open source/cc license.
OSCAF is very handy for now, because otherwise some re-licensing issues
would
have to be thought out with those16 companies (where one already stopped
existing).
I guess if it keeps the copyright now, it could much easier to relicense
the ontologies later if the current CC-BY is a problem
(which, usually, it is, after some years, when the legal things move on
to new licenses,
as just happens to wikipedia)
Maybe I am overreacting here, usually nobody asks "who has the copyright
on this ontology",
but only look at the licenses (which can only be changed by the owner)
perhaps only big organisations such as Eclipse.org care about such things.
Also, OSCAF has some money backing, my employer DFKI and the other
org members have sponsored some funds for OSCAF, which we could use to
host the
website or sponsor something else. I can't say much about this, because
I am not
in charge alone here, but it is an aspect.
If this is needed now, we can add some (all?) of you (maybe even
freedesktop.org, if it is a legal entity)
as OSCAF "individual members" and create a low-fuzz "just do it" policy
for managing the ontologies.
You would also get a voting right on important decisions, etc, but it is
not mandatory
to do all this.
I would guess given the circumstances that this will be doable quickly.
It has the advantage of having a legal body behind for the publishing of
the ontologies,
similar to apache or eclipse or w3c or oasis.
Also, the ontologies are used beyond KDE, by Nokia in MAEMO and in my
own products
of gnowsis.com, so personally, I would think a legal neutral
standardization body could help
to keep all these partners happy.
If this is not the case, if OSCAF as legal body is not wanted here, then
please say so,
I think then the ontologies can be edited by anyone under the current
licensing terms
(but never relicensed).
my 2c,
best
Leo
It was Arun Raghavan who said at the right time 04.05.2009 21:30 the
following words:
2009/5/4 Sebastian Trüg <[email protected]>:
Hi guys,
maybe you read my blog about Xesam and Nepomuk[1]. In essence I think we
should create a new project which will handle the maintenance of the desktop
ontologies. So far for me this means the Nepomuk ontologies NAO, NIE, and
PIMO.
IMHO it makes perfect sense to have a dedicated project for several reasons:
* no copies floating around in different project packages
* one standard that we agree on (I know this is hard)
* one platform for discussion/bugs and general maintenance
* One central ontologies package very much like the mimetype package
This sounds perfect.
I mentioned in my blog that we already created the OSCAF sourceforge
project[2]. Now I don't really care how we name the project. Maybe OSCAF is
not the best name, maybe something very simple like "desktop-ontologies" would
I would say that we should reuse one of Xesam or Nepomuk for this. Why
add one more buzz-word to an already crowded namespace? :) Besides, it
makes it easier to associate the ontology with the project, then.
be better. In any case I think using sourceforce (I prefer it since I already
have 3 projects there and was always happy with it) or something similar is a
good idea. We then don't need to spend time on setting up task tracking
systems or mailing lists. We just use what is there.
_If_ we agree to keep this effort under the head of Nepomuk or Xesam,
I guess we can just reuse the existing infrastructure?
Thanks for taking the initiative on this -- I think it'd be great if
we could all quickly converge on how we want to proceed from here, and
get the ball rolling.
Cheers,
--
____________________________________________________
DI Leo Sauermann http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer
Kuenstliche Intelligenz DFKI GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122
P.O. Box 2080 Fon: +49 631 20575-116
D-67663 Kaiserslautern Fax: +49 631 20575-102
Germany Mail: [email protected]
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof.Dr.Dr.h.c.mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats:
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
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