About the Future Ontolog Infrastructure project

Project Scope and Purpose

As we transition into Ontolog's next life-stage, we have an opportunity to update Ontolog Infrastructure. Many enabling technologies and platforms have become available since Ontolog first started operating. Many Ontolog members have considerable experience with web-based collaboration, both general and Ontolog-specific, from which to draw. This project aims to draw on these resources to identify what the Ontolog Infrastructure should do (requirements and desiderata); what options (candidate solutions, including components, and combinations thereof) exist; and which candidate solutions satisfy which requirements and desiderata.

Goals of this project include:

• Better enable asynchronous contribution to Ontolog discussions.
• Better integrate synchronous and asynchronous contributions and conversations.
• Improve the topical organization of Ontolog content, whenever and however it is generated.
• Improve the findability and interconnectedness of Ontolog content.

Participants

• All Ontolog members are encouraged to participate in this project by making suggestions and by participating in discussion and analysis.
• Project Coordinator: Amanda Vizedom

Project Working Materials and Products

Collection and Generation of Input through the Comment Section below

We will use the Disqus Comments feature of this wiki for initial collection and discussion of suggestions. This mechanism for discussion is new to this community, though many of us will have used it elsewhere. We are seeking, in particular, to take advantage of the threaded comments feature. The upvote/downvote feature may also prove helpful.

You do need to sign in to Disqus in order to participate. With that sign in, you can comment, respond to other comments, start new threads, upvote and downvote comments, and so forth.

Topics

This discussion is focused on collecting and generating community input on two related but separable topics:

• Suggested requirements and desiderata for the future Ontolog infrastructure.
• Possible implementations, as in components, platforms, architectures, and combinations thereof.

Guidelines

• To add a new requirement or desideratum suggestion to the list, please post a new top-level comment, including the phrase "suggested requirement" or similar in your subject line.
• Please describe requirements and desiderata in terms of capabilities and functions, avoiding reference to specific technical solutions. Helpful content includes examples, motivations, importance and priority.

• To add a new possible implementation suggestion to the list, please post a new top-level comment, including the phrase "possible implementation" or similar in your subject line.
• Helpful content regarding possible implementations includes specific identification, with links if possible, advantages and disadvantages, technical and process considerations, and identification of which requirement(s) and/or desiderata the suggestion addresses.

• To discuss a suggestion already made, reply to the comment post in which it is made, or to some comment in the discussion thread under that comment post.
• Discussion may give rise to additional suggestions; these should be added separately to the list as new top-level comments in this section, so that each independent requirement or desideratum can have its own discussion.
• To indicate that you regard a comment as helpful or unhelpful, worthy of notice or better ignored, you can click on the up or down arrow heads below a comment. Single up- or down- votes don't have much effect, but trends in upvoting and downvoting can effect the order of appearance of comments, giving the community some capability to push more useful contributions to the top and less useful ones to the bottom, where they may be less likely to command attention. Use these powers wisely.

Discussion starts below

NOTE about privacy and Disqus comments: Currently, leaving a comment using the Disqus comments feature requires that you have, and log into a Disqus account.

• If you have a Disqus account already, it will work here.
• Please be aware that comments made on any site using a particular Disqus account are all visible, together, via that account's Disqus profile.
• We are evaluating alternatives that make such an external link.
• If you would like to add a comment but do not want to sign in with Disqus, you may use the Discussion page for this Wiki Page. Click "Views">"Discussion" at the upper right of this page.