SPAR Ontologies in GitHub and new contribution guidelines 09/01/2018

Dear all, We are happy to share a bunch of New Year announcements about the SPAR Ontologies! First of all, we are thrilled to announce that the migration of all the SPAR Ontologies from Sourceforge to GitHub has been just completed. The new [SPAR Ontologies GitHub Organisation](https://github.com/sparontologies) includes several repositories, one for each ontology included in SPAR (e.g. https://github.com/sparontologies/cito). This makes easier to post and handle issues and to gather new feedback from the community by using the GitHub issue tracker available in each repository. The old [Sourceforge repository](https://sourceforge.net/projects/sempublishing/) will be still available to get the old versions of the various ontologies. While all the current (and future) ontologies will be available via the http://purl.org/spar and http://purl.org/cerif pURL domains (e.g. http://purl.org/spar/cito), we have also activated a new https://w3id.org/spar domain as an alternative route for getting to all them (e.g. https://w3id.org/spar/cito). However, even if they are also accessible via the w3id.org service, the IRIs of all the SPAR Ontologies and of all their entities keep the http://purl.org base for backward compatibility reasons – luckily, the pURL service is currently maintained by the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/services/purl/). In addition, the content negotiation mechanism of all the SPAR ontologies is now handled outside the [SPAR Ontologies website](http://www.sparontologies.net), by means of the [w3id.org service](https://github.com/perma-id/w3id.org/blob/master/spar/.htaccess). Thus, in case of some issues in the website (e.g. server crashes), the ontologies will be reachable anyway. Finally, we are very happy to announce the new [contribution guidelines](https://sparontologies.github.io) for allowing the community to propose new ontologies to be added within the SPAR suite. We have defined a clear workflow - thanks to the new GitHub repository - for accepting external contribution in a more structured way, compared to what happened in the past. We are also very please to say we are in the process of including the [FAIR* Reviews ontology](https://w3id.org/fr/def/core) within the SPAR Ontologies, our very first early adopter of the aforementioned contribution guidelines. Please do not forget to follow us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/sparontologies) for getting additional updates.