Hi all,

I'd like to bring to your attention the current state of the Reengineer 
component and its next future (if any) in the project.
Before being part of Stanbol, the design and the implementation of this 
component was started by the CNR team in the IKS project. 
Right now, we at CNR have no more resources in order to put effort in its 
maintenance. I am wondering if someone in Stanbol wants to continue to keep 
care and contribute to the evolution of the reengineer otherwise we should 
discuss about  its possible removal from Stanbol. My personal opinion is that 
it could be somehow merged with the cmsadapter.
I remember you that the main functionality of the reengineer is to extract RDF 
triples from both relational databases and XML files. The transformation 
(reengineering) is performed according to an ontology [1,2] which describes the 
structure of the original source. In case of RDBMS, the output of the component 
is a RDF dataset described (rdf:type triples) in terms of tables, columns, 
raws. Primary keys and foreign keys allows to generate respectively URIs and 
relations between objects in the dataset. On the other hand in case of XMLs. 
the output is always a RDF dataset but the fact it is described in terms of 
elements, attributes and in general any descriptor part of an XML and XMLSchema.

Note that parts of Stanbol Reengineer, namely the base API and the XML plugin, 
were extensively used in an important knowledge extraction component of the AmI 
Case demonstrator. This was billed as an effective usage example of the IKS, 
and one of the earliest at that, so at least those parts should survive in some 
form. Especially since the AmI environment will be setup again for the Y3 
Review. Even having them as external bundles in IKS and not in Stanbol would be 
acceptable.

--
Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese
Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab)
Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology (ISTC)
National Research Council  (CNR)
Via Nomentana 56, Roma - Italy

[1] http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/iks/dbs_l1.owl
[2] http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/iks/oxml.owl

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