Jeepers, no posts for 3+ months and then two in one day! The truth is that I hadn’t realized the last post was still sitting in my drafts folder more than a month after I wrote it.

Moving on…

A number of folks have been interested in installing the Registry, especially since we’ve talked before about ‘easy installation’ being one of our design goals.

We’re pleased to announce that we have finally tweaked things to make a reasonably simple install from our subversion repository possible and provided some hopefully simple instructions detailing how to get the Registry up and running. We don’t provide enough tweaking or instructions (yet) to fully customize the interface, so once it’s installed it’ll still look exactly like the Registry, just running on your server instead of ours.

Whenever we update the production server, we’ll tag that code in subversion and update the link in the instructions (tying a string around my finger to help me remember as we speak), but there won’t be any other ‘release’ announcement unless we do something major.

Whenever we modify the database structure, we’ll provide a sql script to alter the database with each release. These scripts will always modify the database as it was after the previous release, so if you skip releases you’ll need to run the scripts sequentially. But this will all be on the instructions page.

We expect to update the production code quite often over the next few months.

If you’ve been watching the Registry closely (and we know you have), you’ll have noticed that a few weeks ago we started supporting the registration of metadata schemas. It’s not finished and far from perfect, but the perfect can often be the enemy of the good and at the moment it’s, well, good enough for now.

What makes it tough to get schema registration right is that our approach to what we’re calling registration attempts to be cross-cultural — trying to create a bridge from the technologies supporting the Semantic Web to the somewhat more ‘traditional’ data transfer technologies like XML.

We’re also trying to ‘eat our own dog food’ and are using an internally registered Application Profile to define the properties we’re using to describe metadata schemas and ultimately Application Profiles. This AP helps drive the schema registration user interface and we hope at some point we’ll be able to use a registered AP to generate many different interfaces, both human and application. It’s arguably too ambitious, but baby steps…

Vocabulary Management
The Registry is really more Vocabulary Management Application than Registry at this point, since we’ve layered so many management services on top of the basic registry functions. It manages two types of vocabularies:

• Value vocabularies — unordered lists of values (terms) that we express as skos concept schemes in RDF and a simple enumeration in XML Schema
• Class/Property vocabularies — lists of classes, properties (or attributes depending on your mental model) that we currently express as rdf:properties and rdfs:classes

Much of our terminology (value vocabularies, metadata schema, application profile) stems from our work with the Dublin Core Community more than the Semantic Web Community and maybe we’ll refactor some of those names as we move forward. But we hope the semweb folks can translate and we hope that the DC folks won’t hold our ultimate departure from some of their terms against us.

In the meantime, feel free to play in the sandbox.