There is always work to do. This is true for every project. It is even more true for open-source projects. It is the truth in itself when it comes to the semantic desktop and Nepomuk. Getting people to help was never a strong point of mine. I think that is partly due to the fuzzy task descriptions. Well, today I try once again but with a slightly different scope. It is not about KDE or Nepomuk coding, this is about the work that needs to be done for the maintenance of the Nepomuk ontologies.

The ontologies have a moved history. They started out as part of the Nepomuk research project. When that was over they lived on in the kdebase package. Then the OSCAF foundation was created with the goal to maintain the ontologies. That did not really work out. Thus, we created the oscaf project on Sourceforge trying to do ontology development the open-source way. This sort of worked but communication with other projects was troublesome (The Tracker project still maintains their own fork of the ontologies). With the oscaf project the shared-desktop-ontologies project was born. Thus, we had a package named shared-desktop-ontologies in the oscaf project. Then we created the shared-desktop-ontologies project on freedesktop.org hoping that this in combination with a move to git would bring the Tracker guys back to the main development – at least in the same repository. Of course that did not happen either. So now we have the oscaf project on sourceforce, the shared-desktop-ontologies project on freedesktop.org and to top it all off we have semanticdesktop.org/ontologies which is used to host the ontologies semantic-web-style.

So much for the mess. If you are still reading that means that I did not scare you away and you might be a candidate to help us out of that mess.

This is what needs to be done – at least that is my current idea, if you bring better ideas – great:

Create a simple website for the shared-desktop-ontologies project on freedesktop.org including links to semanticdesktop.org and the sdo package releases. Migrate the package releases of sdo from SourceForge to freedesktop.org. I suppose they can be put in some ftp folder and be linked in some download section on the new website. Set in place scripts that automatically update the ontology pages on semanticdesktop.org like the NIE page. This involves: Convert the existing HTML headers that we have for ontologies like NAO or NIE into docbook (html2docbook might help with the first conversion step) Write a script that parses the ontologies and creates docbook code with links to super and sub-properties/classes including links between the ontologies. The result should be something like the existing (but outdated) HTML pages. Write a script that converts the docbook to HTML and puts it onto semanticdesktop.org. If possible somehow integrate the l10n script that Sebastien Renard wrote to allow translation of labels and comments (Sebastien or me can provide the script).

There you have it. Not a single line of C++ required and not really any ontology or RDF knowledge necessary. It would be grand to find someone willing to invest some time and effort into this allowing us to finally have up-to-date ontologies on semanticdesktop.org and a clean shared-desktop-ontologies portal.

Thanks for reading.