Sustainability Plan

As one of the goals of comunica is to provide a research platform for Web querying, it is important that this resource is being properly maintained, both short-term and long-term.

Short-term

Comunica is being actively developed by two PhD students in collaboration with one Postdoctoral researcher and one professor in IDLab — Ghent University – imec. The comunica software is essential for the future of IDLab, and is being used in several projects Belgian and European already, which requires and ensures the maintenance on the short term.

Using the GitHub project boards, the short-term implementation and maintenance issues are tracked. All new features and fixes are tracked using issues and pull requests, which makes the development of comunica available for anyone to follow and collaborate.

Long-term

IDLab (a team of more than 400 researchers) guarantees maintenance of this project for 5 years after initiation. IDLab is dedicated to providing high-quality research output, and ensuring their sustainability. Additionally, due to our collaboration within the RDFJS community, community-wide motivation is strengthened. Next to that, comunica is licensed under the liberal MIT license. This means that anyone who is willing to, is allowed to maintain its own fork of the software, which voids any legal barriers towards long-term maintenance.

This project is also part of the Comunica Association, which is a non-profit organization that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability of certain open-source projects.