DCMI FOAF Agreement: October 2014 status update

Prepared by: Tom Baker and Dan Brickley
Published:   2014-10-01
See also:    http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_FOAF_Cooperation/Update_201406

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Highlights

* The domain XMLNS.COM is scheduled to expire on 2024-09-07.
* The most recent DCMI mirror of the FOAF snapshot is at
  http://dublincore.org/FOAF/2014-10-01/foafsvn2014-10-01.gz 

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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. As of 2014, this
Task Group falls under the DCMI Technical Board [6].

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"The FOAF Project will grant DCMI administrative and technical access to the domain xmlns.com."

--  Dan Brickley, Libby Miller, and Tom Baker currently have the DNS password.
--  Tom is working with Stuart to set up a shared password vault using LastPass

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"DCMI will monitor payment of domain name fees by the FOAF Project."

--  WHOIS (see also [5]) 

    Domain Name: xmlns.com
    Registry Domain ID: 9897625_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
    Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net
    Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net
    Updated Date: 2014-09-29T16:13:40Z
    Creation Date: 1999-09-07T13:30:41Z
    Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2024-09-07T13:30:41Z
    >>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2014-09-29T14:56:29Z <<<

    Registry Registrant ID: 
    Registrant Name: Dan Brickley
    Registrant Organization: FOAF project
    Registrant City: London
    Registrant Postal Code: W9 1QF
    Registrant Country: GB
    Registrant Phone: +44.7827808298
    Registrant Email: ae30eb109318e1d3eadcc4472d0238cb-1050201@contact.gandi.net

Quote: "The FOAF Project will provide public notice of impending semantic changes in the FOAF vocabulary."

--  The current version of FOAF is Version 0.99, "Paddington". A "1.0" release 
    has been discussed on foaf-dev but no dates have been set.
    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."

--  Dan created a snapshot of the FOAF Subversion project on October 1:

        http://danbri.org/2014/foafsite/foafsvn2014-10-01.gz

    DCMI has saved this snapshot at
    http://dublincore.org/FOAF/2014-10-01/foafsvn2014-10-01.gz 
    where it will appear at the next Web build.

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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 spec
    http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

--  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"

--  No progress to report.

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"...propose the DCMI Generic Namespace Policy for RDF Vocabularies as a
principled basis for such agreements, welcoming its extension or revision"

--  No progress to report.

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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

--  In September 2014, Dan undertook an overhaul of xmlns.com and of 
    the FOAF Project server (http://www.foaf-project.org/) in order to 
    improve their security.

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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://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/xmlns.com
[6] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/DCMI_Technical_Board