Mavenize Ontology as a zip file artifact

[griffbbn]

I do not know if Mavenization is of general interest, but I have done a minimal set of changes to wrap the ontology files into a Maven artifact. If the changes are adopted, the merge should modify the groupId of the artifact and will have to modify the paths of the repositories in the distributionManagement section of the POM.

[cwacekINV]

@griffbbn What does making the ontology a Maven artifact achieve? I'm not sure I've actually ever used Maven but my understanding is that it is some sort of build tool.

At first blush I'm not sure it makes sense to include project specific build configs in this repository.

[griffbbn]

Maven, Gradle, and Ivy all use the same concept for specifying and publishing project dependencies. They allow a project to specify specific versions of external executables, libraries, and data and include and use them without having to install them locally on each developer host or load them into the project repository. You then publish snapshots or releases of your 'artifact' (in this case, the zip file) into the established repository infrastructure and anyone can incorporate it in turn into their project in less than a minute. As shops update their development processes one of these three systems generally seems to be involved. (end of commercial :->)

The ontology doesn't need to be 'built' (unless we want to publish it in several different formats) but we should want to make it easy for someone to use. Publishing it in the existing repository network supports this. I could have done this in Gradle, but I'm more familiar with Maven at the moment and the result is usable by all three systems in any case.

Feel free to incorporate it into the repo or not. It doesn't eliminate someone just cloning the repository and using it that way...