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: [log in to unmask]
    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/

--
Tom Baker <[log in to unmask]>