DCMI FOAF Agreement: August 2013 status update
Prepared by: Tom Baker and Dan Brickley
Published: 2013-08-29
See also: http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_FOAF_Cooperation/Update_201308
Context
The DCMI FOAF Cooperation Task Group [1] is a result of the May 2011 Agreement
between DCMI and the FOAF Project [2]. The Task Group implements and monitors
the specific agreements [3] outlined in the DCMI FOAF Agreement.
Recent Developments
-- Tom and Dan met in September at DC-2012 [4] in Kuching.
-- As of October 1st 2012, Dan Brickley has been employed full-time at Google
(UK). It is common for Google staff to contribute to external standards-related
initiatives, his involvement with FOAF is expected to continue at current (ad
hoc, occasional) level.
-- As of July 2013, DCMI has ceased operations as a company limited by
guarantee in Singapore and currently operates as a project of ASIS&T [5], the
Association for Information Science and Technology. This change has no effect
on DCMI's ongoing commitment to its agreement with the FOAF Project.
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"The FOAF Project will grant DCMI administrative and technical access to the domain xmlns.com."
-- Dan, Libby Miller, and Tom currently have the DNS password.
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"DCMI will monitor payment of domain name fees by the FOAF Project."
-- WHOIS (see also [6]):
Domain Name: XMLNS.COM
Registrar: GANDI SAS
Whois Server: whois.gandi.net
Referral URL: http://www.gandi.net
Name Server: A.DNS.GANDI.NET
Name Server: B.DNS.GANDI.NET
Name Server: C.DNS.GANDI.NET
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 03-aug-2011
Creation Date: 07-sep-1999
Expiration Date: 07-sep-2015
-- Dan should update his contact information:
nic-hdl: DB4349-GANDI
owner-name: FOAF project
organisation: FOAF project
person: Dan Brickley
address: '154-1 Stadionweg, Amsterdam'
zipcode: 1077 TA
city: Amsterdam
country: Netherlands
phone: +31.634036802
fax:
email: ae30eb109318e1d3eadcc4472d0238cb-1050201@contact.gandi.net
lastupdated: 2012-07-13 11:16:39
Quote: "The FOAF Project will provide public notice of impending semantic changes in the FOAF vocabulary."
-- Dan reports that the current version of FOAF ("Marco Polo"). A "1.0" release
has been discussed on foaf-dev but there is no current candidate design for
this. Dan's work on schema.org may motivate a larger effort towards
convergence of person-related structured data vocabularies, but there is
nothing concrete to report at this stage.
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"DCMI will mirror the FOAF Subversion project."
-- DCMI's latest mirror of FOAF [7], dated 2013-05-16, is current as of the
date of this report. This mirror was created by running the command:
svn co http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaf/trunk/xmlns.com/htdocs/
and turning the result into a compressed tarball. Tom also saves an SVN
repository of the entire "foaf" project on his own machine:
svn co http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaf/
though this is technically not required by the agreement with DCMI.
The above method does not provide a "complete" SVN snapshot. In 2012, Dan
generated a [http://danbri.org/2012/foafsvn/latest-snapshot.gz "full" SVN
snapshot] with the following script:
svnadmin dump /mnt/foafdisk-sites/svn/foaf | gzip - > foafsvn/latest-snapshot.gz
Dan re-ran the command in July 2013:
/var/sites/danbri.org/htdocs/2013/svnfiles$ svnadmin dump /mnt/foafdisk-sites/svn/foaf | gzip - > foafsvn2013-07-05.gz
resulting in:
http://danbri.org/2013/svnfiles/foafsvn2013-07-05.gz
a dump of all 1,406 SVN revisions which can be used to recreate Subversion
repository. DCMI has saved this snapshot at
http://dublincore.org/FOAF/2013-07-05/foafsvn2013-07-05.gz.
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"DCMI will monitor for outages in availability of the FOAF vocabulary and make
a mirrored copy available if required."
-- Tom occasionally pings the FOAF vocabulary. On 2013-05-14, Tom reported to
Dan that he was unable to access http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ or
http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaf/trunk/xmlns.com/htdocs/. Dan responded that
the server was overloaded and just needed a reboot, which fixed the problem.
-- Ideally, we should find a way to automate the monitoring of downtime, maybe
even logging the results.
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"...consider the viability of the approach exemplified by this agreement as a
model for similar arrangements with other vocabularies"
-- The DCMI FOAF agreement is cited in a discussion paper [8] being prepared
for a joint DCMI/W3C special session [9] on the long-term preservation and
governance of RDF vocabularies at the DC-2013 conference in Lisbon in
September.
-- There has been informal talk about extending the agreement to other
vocabularies, as well as investigating the long term plans around purl.org
and w3.org domains?
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"...propose the DCMI Generic Namespace Policy for RDF Vocabularies [10] as a
principled basis for such agreements, welcoming its extension or revision"
The discussion paper [8] for the DC-2013 special session on vocabulary
preservation cites the Generic Namespace Policy.
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"...identify candidate properties in the DCMI and FOAF vocabularies for
explicit semantic alignment."
-- No progress to report.
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"Collaboration will be re-evaluated and re-affirmed annually."
-- DCMI and the FOAF Project hereby re-affirm the agreement.
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Other issues
-- Dan plans to revisit the security of the FOAF Project servers to guard
against compromise of the FOAF schemas.
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References
[1] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_FOAF_Cooperation
[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/2011/05/02/dcmi-foaf/
[3] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_FOAF_Cooperation/Specific_Agreements
[4] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_FOAF_Cooperation/Update_201308
[5] http://dublincore.org/about/reshaping/
[6] http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/xmlns.com
[7] http://dublincore.org/FOAF/2013-05-16/svn.foaf-project.org_foaf_trunk_xmlns.com_htdocs.tar.Z
[8] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/Vocabulary_Preservation_discussion_paper
[9] http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/index/pages/view/vocPres
[10] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-namespace-generic/