Ohloh and Ontology Social Networking
I love this concept. Ohloh is a social networking site that is focused on the users and developers of open source software. It is a great way to raise awareness about the various open source software packages that are out there, and put users in touch with others who have been there - used or developed the software to meet their own needs.
The other day, I was thinking about a problem that I’ve got with ontologies on the semantic web today. Please please correct me if I’m going about this the wrong way, but it always seems that I have to look hard to find the ontologies that I want to use for a given project.
One good thing about the semantic web community is that they try to preserve URIs forever. There is a downside to that practice - it results in a cornucopia of dead information. I have a very hard time, when I see an ontology for the first time, knowing whether it’s still in use.
Enter Ontology Social Networking: modeled after Ohloh, ontology developers and users can stand up and share both what ontologies they have used, and how they have used them. This will help to connect fragmented and confused users, and to encourage people to learn from existing solutions. It will encourage people to collaborate on developing new ontologies and to reuse existing ones where appropriate. With sufficient data, recommender systems could begin to directly connect users with useful and relevant ontologies much more efficiently than can be done currently through search, pick, and choose.
Who wants to get started building something like this?