Hi,

the discussion came up that we have to maintain a large code base in Stanbol.

This has historical reasons as a lot of stuff was added to Stanbol
during the funding period of the IKS project. Now that IKS has ended
we see that development is still in progress for the enhancer but less
is happening in other parts.

When trying to explain what Stanbol is, I try to separate between
Enhancement services and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KReS)
services.

Enhancement:
 - Enhancer + Engines
 - Entityhub
 - Contenthub

KReS:
 - Ontologymanager
 - Reasoner
 - Rules

A large code base with Enhancer and KReS has the downside that
changing something in commons could affect many components that need
to be changed and tested. Keeping all those components in compatible
sync is a time consuming maintenance act. With less active
developments in some parts this work can hardly be done.

Perhaps it is time to set a clearer focus for Stanbol. For most people
this would be the Enhancer and I would agree with this. As a
consequence we would need to reduce the number of maintained
components in Stanbol. This number can of course be increased at any
time again when there are active maintainers. Technically this would
mean to move the stuff that is not maintained at the moment to
'/contrib'.

What do you think?

--
Fabian
http://twitter.com/fctwitt

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