Whither Stanbol

["A. Soroka" <aj...@virginia.edu>]

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

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>]

Sure, I'll do that, thanks for the feedback.

I have to make an amend though. I asked about stanbol accepting form data
POST requests, turns out it does, it's just the error message when you get
the parameters wrong says it's not implemented. (this needs changed? I can
submit a pull request if I find the relevant piece of code)

For anyone wondering, stanbol accepts the following:

POST
content => "Text to enhance"
format => {equivalent to Accept header}
async => boolean (don't know what this changes)

Regards,
Antero

On Mon, 23 May 2016 10:50 pm Stefano Cossu, <sc...@artic.edu> wrote:

> Hi Antero,
>
> Thanks for the very useful documentation. If you could upload the md files
> as wiki pages in the Github project, that would be awesome. If that could
> be referenced somehow in the main documentation site, it would be even
> better.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Stefano
>
> On 05/23/2016 08:44 AM, Antero Duarte wrote:
>
> 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 <sc...@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> wrote:
>>
>>> HI Antero,
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte <a....@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> 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
>>> > > >
>>> > > >
>>> > >
>>> >
>>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Stefano Cossu
>> Director of Application Services, Collections
>>
>> The Art Institute of Chicago
>> 116 S. Michigan Ave.
>> Chicago, IL 60603
>> 312-499-4026
>>
>
> --
>
> Stefano Cossu
> Director of Application Services, Collections
>
> The Art Institute of Chicago
> 116 S. Michigan Ave.
> Chicago, IL 60603
> 312-499-4026
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Stefano Cossu <sc...@artic.edu>]

Hi Antero,

Thanks for the very useful documentation. If you could upload the md 
files as wiki pages in the Github project, that would be awesome. If 
that could be referenced somehow in the main documentation site, it 
would be even better.

Thank you,

Stefano


On 05/23/2016 08:44 AM, Antero Duarte wrote:
> 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 <scossu@artic.edu 
> <ma...@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 <rharo@apache.org
>>     <ma...@apache.org>> wrote:
>>
>>         HI Antero,
>>
>>         On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte
>>         <a.fduarte1@gmail.com <ma...@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 <rharo@apache.org
>>         <ma...@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
>>         <ajs6f@virginia.edu <ma...@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
>

-- 

Stefano Cossu
Director of Application Services, Collections

The Art Institute of Chicago
116 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603
312-499-4026

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>]

Thank you for your reply, it helps a lot.

About Marmotta, I'm quite happy to write the documentation if someone can
teach me how to do it myself. I will also have a look when I have time and
try to submit pull requests if I think some bits of my own documentation
can benefit the rest of the community.

About remote SOLR, I will have a look again into this but I could possibly
use some help to set that up. Once again, I'm happy to give back any
knowledge that I get from this process in the form of a step by step
instruction guide.

Ontonet: Will park this for now.

Form data POST requests: Yes, turns out it is implemented, I noticed this
when inspecting the graphical frontend for the enhancer, it's just the
error message you get back when you send form data is misleading if you get
the wrong fields:

"Parsing Content as 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' is not
supported!Please directly POST the content and set the 'Content-Type'
header to the media type of the parsed content. 'application/octet-stream'
SHOULD BE used if the media type of the parsed content is not known."

I can try to find the relevant piece of code and submit a pull request to
change this message as well.

Thanks for the extra info, it was helpful and useful.

Best Regards,
Antero

On Tue, 24 May 2016 at 10:49 Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hi Antero,
>
> I'm going to try to answer your questions as better as possible, but for
> some of them probably Rupert could provide a better explanation. Besides
> your questions, I will take a look to your documentation ASAP but please,
> feel free to directly suggest any change you consider should be done. There
> is a mirror of Apache Stanbol codebase at GitHub. Making pull requests
> there would be a very good way for easing documentation improvements. We
> can later take pull requests' diffs files and apply them directly to SVN
> based local copy.
>
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:45 PM Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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?
> >
>
> As far as I know, that is exactly the use case the Sesame Yard was planned
> for. As you have also stated, others have reported in the list several
> problems for using it within a Linking Engine. So this is again a good
> opportunity for compiling an step by step tutorial and include it as part
> of the documentation. Anyway, and Rupert could probably confirm this point,
> you must take into account that linking process is somehow limited using a
> Sesame Yard. Several features of the Entity Lookup process in Stanbol are
> totally coupled to the Solr Yard, basically because there is no way to
> achieve the same with SPARQL queries and also because Triplestore's don't
> provide fully fulltext search support
>
>
> >
> > What is the current version of Solr bundled with Stanbol, and are we
> > planning on moving on to some more recent version?
> >
>
> Stanbol's trunk solr's current version is 4.4.0. I suppose we can upfrade
> to Solr 5, but I don't see a major issue with that right now.
>
>
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
> Again, AFAIK, this is already possible. The main limitation of using an
> stand-alone Solr server is that you could not use the current Stanbol FST
> engine. FST is the best option if your knowledge base is very large, which
> by the way would be probably the major reason for using an external Solr
> cluster.
>
>
> >
> > 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?
> >
>
> I can't help you with nothing regarding Ontonet, I have never used it,
> sorry.
>
>
> >
> > 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?
> >
>
> Mmmm, I'm again not sure, it sounds to me that this is already supported,
> but I would need to check it. If not, could you please create a Jira issue
> for this?
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> >
> > 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 <sc...@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>
> >> rharo@apache.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> HI Antero,
> >>
> >>
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte < <a.fduarte1@gmail.com
> >
> >>> a.fduarte1@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>
> >>> rharo@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>
> >>> ajs6f@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
> >>
> >
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org>]

Hi Antero,

I'm going to try to answer your questions as better as possible, but for
some of them probably Rupert could provide a better explanation. Besides
your questions, I will take a look to your documentation ASAP but please,
feel free to directly suggest any change you consider should be done. There
is a mirror of Apache Stanbol codebase at GitHub. Making pull requests
there would be a very good way for easing documentation improvements. We
can later take pull requests' diffs files and apply them directly to SVN
based local copy.

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:45 PM Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?
>

As far as I know, that is exactly the use case the Sesame Yard was planned
for. As you have also stated, others have reported in the list several
problems for using it within a Linking Engine. So this is again a good
opportunity for compiling an step by step tutorial and include it as part
of the documentation. Anyway, and Rupert could probably confirm this point,
you must take into account that linking process is somehow limited using a
Sesame Yard. Several features of the Entity Lookup process in Stanbol are
totally coupled to the Solr Yard, basically because there is no way to
achieve the same with SPARQL queries and also because Triplestore's don't
provide fully fulltext search support


>
> What is the current version of Solr bundled with Stanbol, and are we
> planning on moving on to some more recent version?
>

Stanbol's trunk solr's current version is 4.4.0. I suppose we can upfrade
to Solr 5, but I don't see a major issue with that right now.


>
> 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.
>

Again, AFAIK, this is already possible. The main limitation of using an
stand-alone Solr server is that you could not use the current Stanbol FST
engine. FST is the best option if your knowledge base is very large, which
by the way would be probably the major reason for using an external Solr
cluster.


>
> 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?
>

I can't help you with nothing regarding Ontonet, I have never used it,
sorry.


>
> 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?
>

Mmmm, I'm again not sure, it sounds to me that this is already supported,
but I would need to check it. If not, could you please create a Jira issue
for this?

Thanks!


>
> 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 <sc...@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>
>> rharo@apache.org> wrote:
>>
>> HI Antero,
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte < <a....@gmail.com>
>>> a.fduarte1@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>
>>> rharo@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>
>>> ajs6f@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
>>
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>]

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 <sc...@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>
> rharo@apache.org> wrote:
>
>> HI Antero,
>>
>> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte < <a....@gmail.com>
>> a.fduarte1@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>
>> rharo@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>
>> ajs6f@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
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Stefano Cossu <sc...@artic.edu>]

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 <rharo@apache.org 
> <ma...@apache.org>> wrote:
>
>     HI Antero,
>
>     On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte
>     <a.fduarte1@gmail.com <ma...@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 <rharo@apache.org
>     <ma...@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 <ajs6f@virginia.edu
>     <ma...@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

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>]

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> wrote:

> HI Antero,
>
> On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte <a....@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> 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
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org>]

HI Antero,

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:23 PM Antero Duarte <a....@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> 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
> > >
> > >
> >
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Antonio David Pérez Morales <ad...@gmail.com>]

Hi guys

I also agree with the Antero's and Rafa's comments.

Regarding the list created by klim I would add:

- PHP Stanbol client (I created it but it needs to be updated a bit to
cover all the REST api's, right now only EntityHub and Enhancer)
- Java client was developed by Zaizi (Rafa and I were involved on that) but
it needs to be updated as well, so I would create a new version as well
with the new dependency versions.

Apart from that, I was working in trying to make Stanbol work inside Apache
Karaf but I had problems and I didn't have time to continue working on
that. But I would like to make it work because we could leverage many
features provided by Karaf (like ESB, shell command line, remote ssh access
to the console, etc)

So, as agreed, we could extend this list and try to review it among all the
members in this community.

Regards

2016-05-20 12:35 GMT+02:00 klim klim <kl...@gmail.com>:

> Hi all, totally agree regarding the state of the documentation.
> Also, I think it’s very well known current issue, thus I suggest to create
> collaborative google-doc(or whatever you like) for the new version of
> documentation, where community (e.g. myself) and developers can be involved
> together.
>
> it was mentioned about google hangout session, let me just post some
> high-level notes I made with a hope it will help to remember about some
> topics we discussed:
>
> - no ontonet developers, pbbly Reto;
> - two active branches: 0.12 (contenthub) and 1.0 (is not released yet).
> jax-rs 2.0 is in plans, i
> - mprovements in serialization in entityhub; no majors; now bug fixing
> minor differencienies;
> - stanbol xner (high-qulity for NER) ixa nerc pipes;
> - claim that nlp models are apache license;
> - release as a jar wo/ NLP, or a docker version; (currently from Salzburg
> research server)
> - outdated documentation?
> - monitoring?
> - dbpedia update?
> - java client (zaizi)?
> - coreference engine  as a new feature (Christian)
> - facts extraction as a new feature (Rafa)
> - ontology?(synchronize true/false) - 6 sec; (automatic checker of
> ontology changes)
> - sparql endpoint Clerezza, rdf data must be registered with Clerezza (wsj
> service registry); ->
> - named graph into properties -> write a question on the mailing list
> (Reto is not on the call);
> - NO! sync bw/ knowledge base and solr index; Rupert decided against it,
> because solr is a document store which requires reindex all subjects
> involved (transactions…) -> workaround: it’s better to reindex in the loop
> over subjects; triple store is on one jvm or another;
> - you can register 2 solrs without interruption (register two solrs,
> register fst; switch off the old one);
> - ldp graphs indexing
> - stanbol user interface is nothing!;) just configs;
> - solr 5 version now? Solr was never updated
> - should be include in Stanbol: api-changing clerezza (against the update
> or ok for 1.0 version of [Clerezza changed the api completely]), most of
> APIs of Stanbol use Clerezza;
> - pbbly it will be started with 0.12 with Rafa and Fabian; signing in
> Apache Server;
> - also Python client exists
> - folder in entity folder -> dbpedia update script and ppbly even
> configuration;
> - new sling launcher: log back support -> provide support for log servers
> (Sling logging module)
> - GC can free NLP modules - IT’S very IMPORTANT to provide enough MEMORY;
> - event-extraction engine?;
> - Client changes are better to move to configs in Stanbol
>
>
> best,
> Yauhen
>
>
>
>
> > On May 20, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
>
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[klim klim <kl...@gmail.com>]

Hi all, totally agree regarding the state of the documentation. 
Also, I think it’s very well known current issue, thus I suggest to create collaborative google-doc(or whatever you like) for the new version of documentation, where community (e.g. myself) and developers can be involved together.

it was mentioned about google hangout session, let me just post some high-level notes I made with a hope it will help to remember about some topics we discussed:

- no ontonet developers, pbbly Reto;
- two active branches: 0.12 (contenthub) and 1.0 (is not released yet). jax-rs 2.0 is in plans, i
- mprovements in serialization in entityhub; no majors; now bug fixing minor differencienies;
- stanbol xner (high-qulity for NER) ixa nerc pipes;
- claim that nlp models are apache license;
- release as a jar wo/ NLP, or a docker version; (currently from Salzburg research server)
- outdated documentation?
- monitoring?
- dbpedia update?
- java client (zaizi)?
- coreference engine  as a new feature (Christian)
- facts extraction as a new feature (Rafa)
- ontology?(synchronize true/false) - 6 sec; (automatic checker of ontology changes)
- sparql endpoint Clerezza, rdf data must be registered with Clerezza (wsj service registry); -> 
- named graph into properties -> write a question on the mailing list (Reto is not on the call);
- NO! sync bw/ knowledge base and solr index; Rupert decided against it, because solr is a document store which requires reindex all subjects involved (transactions…) -> workaround: it’s better to reindex in the loop over subjects; triple store is on one jvm or another;
- you can register 2 solrs without interruption (register two solrs, register fst; switch off the old one);
- ldp graphs indexing
- stanbol user interface is nothing!;) just configs;
- solr 5 version now? Solr was never updated
- should be include in Stanbol: api-changing clerezza (against the update or ok for 1.0 version of [Clerezza changed the api completely]), most of APIs of Stanbol use Clerezza;
- pbbly it will be started with 0.12 with Rafa and Fabian; signing in Apache Server;
- also Python client exists
- folder in entity folder -> dbpedia update script and ppbly even configuration;
- new sling launcher: log back support -> provide support for log servers (Sling logging module)
- GC can free NLP modules - IT’S very IMPORTANT to provide enough MEMORY;
- event-extraction engine?;
- Client changes are better to move to configs in Stanbol


best,
Yauhen




> On May 20, 2016, at 12:22 PM, Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>> 
>>> 
>> 

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Antero Duarte <a....@gmail.com>]

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
> >
> >
>

Re: Whither Stanbol

[Rafa Haro <rh...@apache.org>]

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
>
>