Which namespace should be used for an open vocabulary published by a private organization?

Question

If you want to contribute a Vocabulary to the LOD community but work for a (commercial) company, the question arises within which (DNS) domain you define the vocabulary/ ontology namespace URI/ IRI?

I know the following possibilities:

• The domain of your company
• The domain of your personal web page
• PURL.org
• vocab.org

Are there more? Which is the best in this case?

---- EDIT 1 ----

I want to add that I tried to register a URL at purl.org but they did not accept it for weeks. They also do not respond to mails or anything. This effort seems to be dead and I consider it dangerous and harmful for the LOD community using it.

Answer 1

I would use purl.org yes. That's weird that they're not answering. They answered pretty quickly when I tried myself. There's also https://w3id.org/ if you're looking for stable and persistent identifiers.

The best however could also simply be to publish the vocabulary yourself. One of the issues with using URIs for the vocabulary of your data is that there's so many to choose from already: http://vocab.cc/

Instead of creating yet another vocabulary make sure the concepts you're trying to identify don't already exist. Also http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/ is a good place to search for existing vocabularies.

If you feel you need to publish new URIs, then try to go with something persistent unless it's so specific for your use-case, then you should perhaps use your company's domain name.