Free Design Directory (was: Re: [ox-en] Peer Economy. A Transition Concept.)
- From: Christian Siefkes <christian siefkes.net>
- Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:10:28 +0200
Hi graham, hi all,
graham wrote:
Chris Watkins wrote:
Graham, re "A general directory can't specialise enough to be useful
for any
particular context." I don't see why - a wiki (say) is not paper and
is not
limited in size.
Sure. But 'open designs' potentially covers everything made by people. A
single website/wiki with all these designs would be the most enormous
centralized creation possible (even wikipedia works so well because it
is made up of introductions plus pointers to further details, rather
than trying to hold all the details itself). Which is why I think a
discovery procedure combined with a description language would be more
useful. Though the ontology for the description language might also end
up being impracticably big.
I wasn't thinking of a site hosting any free design projects themselves, but
of a site listing project descriptions. Something like Freshmeat (which
describes software), not like Sourceforge (which hosts software projects).
That should be feasible, I think. And, of course, to qualify for listing,
designs must be _free_, according to some suitable definition (maybe the
Open Knowledge Definition: http://opendefinition.org/1.0/ , or graham's
http://www.opencollector.org/Whyfree/open_hardware.html ). That should
restrict the number of acceptable candidates enormously, I would think ;-)
IMO more useful than starting another listing would be an adaptation of
DOAP which would allow a design search engine to find designs held within
their natural, specialised context.
You mean Description of a Project [http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap]?
I won't disagree that such a thing would be useful too, though I'm somewhat
weary of those Semantic Web endeavors--generally, they seem to come to
little. And there are advantages of a directory that such distributed
description pages would not have, for example, you can have user ratings and
vitality and popularity ranks (like Freshmeat), and it's easier to add and
update project descriptions. But, of course, the two don't exclude each
other: you can easily add DOAP-like descriptions from the data in a central
directory; and if projects have DOAP-like descriptions, a central directory
could harvest them.
Looking at the DOAP vocabulary
[http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-osproj3/], it seems that
one important point to focus on would be suitable values for the "category"
property. Defining a suitable tree of (or graph) or free design categories
is, in any case, a challenging task, since it's such a huge topic, as you
said. The topic tree from the Appropedia
[http://www.appropedia.org/Category:Topics] could be a useful here, but
there are surely many topics not yet covered there. Any ideas...?
In any case, I have reserved the domain http://www.freedesigndirectory.org/
(though there isn't anything there yet) and would like to investigate these
issues further. If anybody is willing to help, please drop me a note.
Regards
Christian
--
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