The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) recently released its agreement with the Friend of a Friend Project (FOAF). According to the summary, “This agreement outlines specific measures to be undertaken in cooperation between DCMI and the FOAF Project — measures aimed primarily at reinforcing the long-term viability of the FOAF Vocabulary by addressing the risks inherent with having a single point of failure. The two organizations also see this cooperation as an opportunity for better integrating their vocabularies with alignments — mutually declared mappings between semantically overlapping terms — and for promoting the documentation of best-practice usage patterns in which the two vocabularies are used in combination.”

The agreement begins, “The FOAF Vocabulary and DCMI Metadata Terms are often used together in applications, and both are consistently listed among the top vocabularies in the Linked Data space. As organizations, DCMI and the FOAF Project share a common interest in improving resource discovery across the boundaries of information silos on the Web. They share also share a common concern for balancing centralization and decentralization by encouraging the stabilization of third-party extensions and companion vocabularies that enhance the usefulness of the vocabularies they maintain… Both organizations believe that arrangements of mutual support and cooperation among vocabulary maintainers such as this agreement can improve the long-term viability of RDF vocabularies in all niches of the Semantic Web ecosystem — from vocabularies maintained by small, agile, time-limited projects or grass-roots initiatives to vocabularies maintained by stable cultural memory organizations — and offer this agreement as a potential template for others.”

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Image: Courtesy DCMI