Community Call: New tools for Open Know-How - June 11th 2025

Wednesday 11th of June 2025: 4pm CEST (3pm BST, 2pm GMT, 10am EDT, 7am PDT)

Supporting the Open Know-how Discoverability standard for helping to find Designs & Documentation for hardware online is a key role of our Alliance - it is one of the reasons the Internet of Production was established.

We are delighted to present to you some new work and tools built around Open Know-How to enable better ontologies and hardware search online.

Speakers Timm Wille, Robin Vobruba and Pieter Hijma will share their progress made at Open-Source Ecology Germany towards distributed online search for hardware, funded by Next Generation Internet Search.

For a sneak preview, check out the blog post here.

REGISTER FOR THE CALL HERE

(The current platform is ZOOM, we are evaluating alternatives for accessibility, please let us know if you have any trouble or did not receive the invite newsletter and still want to take part!)

For more detailed information and a list of all tools and repositories developed within the NGI Search project and beyond, please check out the Website:

Exploring Technology through Linked Open Data

related Discussion thread:

@max_w @mak3r-nathan @AndrewLamb Maybe we send a reminder on Mo/Tue with the hint, that the newsletter said “Wed 12th” but we’re referring to “Wed 11th” of June?

People from Valueflow, OSEG, OTFN, Appropedia, OSHWA and IoPA are already verified, so it will definitely be a great exchange already.

See you soon.

Minutes June 2025 Community Call

Open Know-How: Announcing New Tools

Towards ontology-based, distributed hardware search

Introduction

This NGI Search project is presented by Open Source Ecology Germany:

  • Robin Vobruba
  • Timm Wille
  • Pieter Hijma

Overview of the work

Robin presents the main graphic, focuses mostly on the bottom part: the scraping:

OKH dataflow - for humans

Robin uses the following notes for presenting the work.

Open Know-How is a standard for meta data for open source hardware projects. The meta data can be specified by humans in OKH manifest files, but the project also includes an updated tool called a scraper that searches for Open Source Hardware projects in well-known repositories and produces OKH manifest files automatically.

A different tool converts the manifest files to RDF data or “linked data”. The benefit of this linked data is that it defines a standard and it allows you to link to other standards as well. An example would be Open Know-Where; meta data that describes location of production facilities and their capabilities.

The meta-data is human-readable and can be presented on a website by means of one of the developed tools. But in addition, the code is also machine-readable, allowing computers to reason about the data and make connections.

Details of changes to Open Know-How

Complexity

The standard is unfortunately more complex, but for a good reason: It is now possible to interlink standards. The ultimate goal is distributed manufacturing and we believe that in order to be efficient in distributed manufacturing, we need to have an interlinked network as foundation.

Scraping

The scraping has highly improved from 35 thousand projects in 2022 to 1 million projects now.

Unfortunately GitHub is not scraped any longer. In fact, this never worked well in the first place. Wikifactory is not scraped either because their API is not available anymore.

The scraping continues to use Appropedia with which we are in close collaboration. We also scrape the projects indexed by OSHWA. Finally, we scrape Thingiverse projects, something which is possible. Many thanks to the ones helping out in scraping!

There are also new sources, for example manifest-repos, a project from Mairin O’grady from Public Inventions. We currently don’t use manifest-lists by Kaspar Emmanuel, but it is in the testing phase.

Images

A change to the standard is that images can now have tags and other metadata.

Ontology

The ontologies (that define the standard) have now permanent URLs and follow best practices. A collaboration with Linked Open Vocabularies on their tool OOPS! was instrumental in this.

Server hosting

For the first time, there is now a server hosting the projects data the community can send queries to.
We have funding to keep the server and the hosting running for 10 years.

Learnings

It is a challenge to acquire high-quality data. First we have to collect all data, then find the overarching concepts found in the data, define that concept in the schema in order to make all data comparable and of high quality.

Another issue is the so-called “distributed identificaton problem”. The same project may be mirrored or forked. How do we know if a project is a mirror or a fork and thus a new project?

In general in IT it is well recognized that “naming things” is challenging. This is even more challenging for standards and it has to be done properly.

Questions from the audience

Timm allows the audience to ask questions that came up in the chat. He shares the website of the project.

Scraping GitHub

Scraping GitHub is not something they allow. It is possible to have a list of repositories that contain open hardware and update the database based on that.

Julian Stirling asks if we considered to have a 1-click GitHub action install that pushes itself to a global list. Victoria Jacqua would be in favor of that. Martin Hauer is reminded of Zenodo’s DOI system that is automatically updated on a new version. Robin thinks that it is a good idea and perhaps this is possible with the earlier mentioned recursive lists.

Robert Reed asks when this is going to be live. It would have been good to have a minimal version live and improve on that incrementally. Timm mentions that there is an easter egg at the end. The project was not in a position to do put this live any earlier, apart from the SPARQL query service (not human friendly).

Outlook

The following tasks are on our radar:

  • Update the IoPA website with references to the new OKH standard
  • Solving the distributed identification problem
  • Establish a standard for Bill of Materials
  • Continue to work on “naming things”
    • This is already a fruitful collaboration with Lynn Foster from Value Flows.
  • LinkML
    • Another, potentially improved way to link data
  • Scraper improvements
    • Robin gives a demo of the current scraper that is too slow.
  • Ask ourselves the big question whether standards is the ideal solution here.
    • Although standards clearly have benefits, there are also drawbacks. We should be open to ask ourselves whether we are on the right path.

Demo of the website

Timm showed a demo of the search UI and showed filtering options and a couple of projects.

Linked Data explanation

Linked data is using internet as a distributed database. Instead of websites that present things to humans, we make data accessible to computers.

Final Questions

Victoria Jaqua as curator of the Open Source Medical Supplies wonders if there is a way to filter for medical data. Robin and Martin Hauer answer that they used the CPC classification that is used in patents. This information has to be provided currently. Victoria stresses that many universities or projects work on the same thing without knowing about each other. Discoverability is important.

Another question from Victoria is whether HardwareX, the leading journal on open source hardware projects should not be included in the scraping. Martin Hauer answers that HardwareX is aware of the project since they hosted a podcast on the subject. Perhaps we should show a stable interface so they can recognize the value of this work.

Repositories

Open Know-How

RDF/Ontology

  • A service for hosting ontologies according to best-practice
  • A linter for RDF
  • A pretty printer for RDF/Turtle files

@AndrewLamb might be good to mention the people present?

@hoijui we could add the OWL Linter OOPS for reference but this is a bit too much detail right? all tools can be found via

thank you all for this great round of members of so many organisations.

We will do a follow-up FAQ on the 25th of June 4pm CEST in this channel: BigBlueButton