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Collaboration and Responsiveness#

Summary#

The collaboration between OEO Foundry ontology teams is essential for its success. When terms from various ontologies are reused, it is expected that questions, change requests and discussions will arise, from both external ontology developers and the user community. To collaborate and address these requests, responsiveness is needed from all involved parties.

Purpose#

The benefits of collaboration and responsiveness are threefold:

(1) Avoid duplication of work (2) Increase interoperability (3) Ensure that ontology content is both sound and meets community needs

Implementation#

Ontology developer teams MUST

  • provide some contact information to current maintainers (see documentation principle), e.g. in a CONTRIBUTING file
  • document their collaboration efforts

Ontology developer teams SHOULD

  • participate in workshops or other collaboration formats from the OEO Foundry
  • collaborate bilaterally with other ontology developer teams if the need arises
  • answer reasonable user requests in an acceptable timeframe
  • provide information about how to collaborate or contribute to the development process in a CONTRIBUTING file

Examples#

Examples for collaboration and responsiveness:

  • Participating in OEO Foundry workshops
  • Contributing to discussions, e.g. on GitHub, Mailing lists
  • Provide information about how to collaborate or contribute to the development process in a CONTRIBUTING file
  • CEPO and OEO: efforts to resolve issue of overlapping terms and competing definitions

Counter-Examples

  • Specifying a private issue tracker
  • Waiting until an issue is resolved before responding, if such resolution comes well after submission of a ticket.