[GMOD-devel] [ANN] DBpedia Archivo - Call to improve the web of ontologies

[Sebastian H. <pr...@in...>]

Apologies for cross-posting


Dear all,

We are proud to announce DBpedia Archivo (https://archivo.dbpedia.org) 
an augmented ontology archive and interface to implement FAIRer 
ontologies. Each ontology is rated with 4 stars measuring basic FAIR 
features. We discovered 890 ontologies reaching on average 1.95 out of 4 
stars. Many of them have no or unclear licenses and have issues w.r.t. 
retrieval and parsing.


# Community action on individual ontologies


We would like to call on all ontology maintainers and consumers to help 
us increase the average star rating of the web of ontologies by fixing 
and improving its ontologies. You can easily check an ontology at 
https://archivo.dbpedia.org/info. If you are an ontology maintainer just 
release a patched version - archivo will automatically pick it up 8 
hours later. If you are a user of an ontology and want your consumed 
data to become FAIRer, please inform the ontology maintainer about the 
issues found with Archivo.


The star rating is very basic and only requires fixing small things. 
However, theimpact on technical and legal usability can be immense.


# Community action on all ontologies (quality, FAIRness, conformity)


Archivo is extensible and allows contributions to give consumers a 
central place to encode their requirements. We envision fostering 
adherence to standards and strengthening incentives for publishers to 
build a better (FAIRer) web of ontologies.


 1.

    SHACL (https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/, co-edited by DBpedia’s CTO D.
    Kontokostas) enables easy testing of ontologies. Archivo offers free
    SHACL continuous integration testing for ontologies. Anyone can
    implement their SHACL tests and add them to the SHACL library on
    Github. We believe that there are many synergies, i.e. SHACL tests
    for your ontology are helpful for others as well.

 2.

    We are looking for ontology experts to join DBpedia and discuss
    further validation (e.g. stars) to increase FAIRness and quality of
    ontologies. We are forming a steering committee and also a PC for
    the upcoming Vocarnival at SEMANTiCS 2021. Please message
    hel...@in...
    <mailto:hel...@in...>if you would like to
    join. We would like to extend the Archivo platform with relevant
    visualisations, tests, editing aides, mapping management tools and
    quality checks.


# How does Archivo work?


Each week Archivo runs several discovery algorithms to scan for new 
ontologies. Once discovered Archivo checks them every 8 hours. When 
changes are detected, Archivo downloads and rates and archives the 
latest snapshot persistently on the DBpedia Databus.


# Archivo's mission


Archivo's mission is to improve FAIRness (findability, accessibility, 
interoperability, and reusability) of all available ontologies on the 
Semantic Web. Archivo is not a guideline, it is fully automated, 
machine-readable and enforces interoperability with its star rating.


- Ontology developers can implement against Archivo until they reach 
more stars. The stars and tests are designed to guarantee the 
interoperability and fitness of the ontology.

- Ontology users can better find, access and re-use ontologies. 
Snapshots are persisted in case the original is not reachable anymore 
adding a layer of reliability to the decentral web of ontologies.


Let’s all join together to make the web of ontologies more reliable and 
stable,


Johannes Frey, Denis Streitmatter, Fabian Götz, Sebastian Hellmann and 
Natanael Arndt

Paper: https://svn.aksw.org/papers/2020/semantics_archivo/public.pdf