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Specific Agreements

2011-09-17

Specific agreements of the agreement between DCMI and the FOAF Project

This page summarizes actions, undertaken and required, needed to fulfill specific agreements made in the Agreement between DCMI and the FOAF Project. The quotes in the blue boxes are taken verbatim from the agreement.

DCMI access to FOAF DNS

FOAF will arrange for its DNS (Domain Name Service) to be controlled by a Registrar account for FOAF as a project and will grant DCMI full technical and administrative access to the Domain Name (xmlns.com).

  • 2011-08-05: Tom and Dan test DCMI access to DNS.
  • NEXT STEPS
    • Need secure way to store passwords.
    • Need documented instructions for technical and administrative access to Domain Name.

DCMI monitoring payment of domain name fees

The FOAF Project commits to pay Domain fees so that it is always at least one year, ideally two or more, paid in advance. DCMI commits to monitor this situation and to step in and take temporary or long term control and stewardship of the domain if the FOAF Project is no longer able or willing to maintain the vocabulary.

Public notice by FOAF Project of semantic changes in FOAF vocabulary

The FOAF Project affirms the maintenance and persistence principles outlined in a DCMI Generic Namespace Policy and commits to make no semantic changes in the FOAF vocabulary without advance public notice of at least two weeks.

ACTION: Define what constitutes "advance public notice" and how changes in the FOAF vocabulary can be tracked.

Nature of the agreement between DCMI and FOAF

This agreement is not a legally binding contract but the public expression of a collaborative partnership. Collaboration will be re-evaluated and re-affirmed annually. DCMI and the FOAF Project have chosen this mechanism rather than a binding and final transfer since it provides a more scalable template for other collaborative relationships. The agreement may, with no ill-will, be publicly ended by either party at any time.
The FOAF Project leads, Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, expect to manage all matters related to vocabulary maintenance in-house for the foreseeable future, including long-term planning for contingencies by which the project leads would become unable to manage the vocabularies themselves. DCMI's engagement with the FOAF Project serves both to promote active collaboration between the two vocabulary maintenance organizations and to underwrite the long-term viability of the FOAF vocabulary domain should the FOAF Project for any reason cease its normal activity. This collaboration also gives both projects a mechanism for sharing among themselves, and the wider community, details of their preservation-planning activities.
DCMI and FOAF will take measures to keep contact information reciprocally available and inform each other on plans and developments concerning their namespaces.

Monitoring of FOAF service outages and DCMI responses

Service outages of a few hours, even days, are a natural feature of the Web and are something for which implementers should plan. However, in the event that the FOAF namespace should become unavailable on the Web for an unusually extended period (e.g., more than two weeks), and communication with the FOAF Project leads cannot be established, DCMI agrees to step in and use its DNS access to arrange for temporary public hosting of the latest copy of FOAF namespace documentations.

NEXT STEPS:

  • Find a downtime monitoring service and register some key RDF URIs.
  • DCMI internally to document process by which the mirrored copy of the FOAF Subversion project could be put online at xmlns.com.

DCMI mirroring of FOAF Subversion project

To prepare for this contingency, DCMI will download and periodically refresh a copy of the FOAF Subversion project.

NEXT STEPS:

  • DCMI to arrange for FOAF Subversion project to be downloaded and periodically refreshed.

If FOAF Project ceases activity

For the longer term, if DCMI should find itself as the publisher of the final results of a FOAF Project that has ceased activity, DCMI will maintain the documentation of FOAF in conformance with the surrounding technical infrastructure (e.g., in response to a revision of W3C Resource Description Framework).