Monday, January 16, 2006

History of MarcOnt

I have just realized that although so much has been said about MarcOnt in many places, I have never said the full story of that initiative. It all stared when I came for the interview to Galway in April,2004. I meet a lot of interesting people from DERI - current colleagues. Among them I meet Anna. We have briefly discussed what we are working on. She told me that since the ontology has to be build based on the community agreement - she is building a portal where a community/e-society can collaborate on the ontology. At that time I had problems with librarians accepting the idea of the Semantic Web. The only remedy was to create an ontology based on their favorite MARC21. But how to do that? Then it struck me - we can get librarians to create the ontology for themselves. But we need a smart process, with negotiations, collaboration and versioning. And this is where MarcOnt Initiative and MarcOnt Portal were born. It was somewhere over Germany on my way home from Galway (through Frankfurt) ...

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