Quick report from OSLC meetup in Paris last week

Last week, as part of the COCLICO project‘s efforts to work on forges interoperability issues, we invited partners and contacts for a short meetup in Paris, with a special guest, Steve Speicher, lead of the OSLC-CM domain work-group.

Steve was in Paris to speak at the Open World Forum 2010 in the forges interoperability track. As time slots at OWF were quite short, we proposed to have this meetup a few days earlier to be able to have more detailed discussions and demos.

Steve has presented the following slides : OSLC Specifications for Interoperability and a screencast of AJAX interaction between an OSLC-CM server and a consumer.

On our side, we made a quick demo (a screencast actually) of our Mantis add-on for OSLC-CM.

We have discussed several technical aspects of OSLC, and also the community of actors working on the specifications. Regarding the french speaking community, there doesn’t seem to be an urgent need to have a specific structure setup so far, but we will nevertheless probably continue sharing content in french whenever we have some time.

I’ve been very glad to meet Steve, and hopefully, there are gonna be other times for new meetups. Why not a formal OSLC conference some day ?

In the meantime, feel free to tell us if you’d like to discuss OSLC and forges interoperability.

“Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and Practice” published

A new paper of ours was just published. If you’re curious about all that Semantic Web and Linked Data hype and how it would impact forges and other software development tools, and the link with Open Source development platforms, then, read this :

Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and Practice
(DOI: 10.4018/jossp.2010040103)
Authors: Olivier Berger (Institut Telecom, France); Valentin Vlasceanu (Institut Telecom, France); Christian Bac (Institut Telecom, France); Quang Vu Dang (Institut Telecom, France); Stéphane Lauriere (Mandriva, France)
in International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP) Volume: 2, Issue: 2 (2010), Pages: 29-40 pp.

Here’s the abstract:
Continue reading ““Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and Practice” published”

First draft of Helios_bt bug ontology : request for comment

We’ve been working on modeling bug reports properties for quite a long time, but never managed to stabilize an ontology specification. Better late than never, here’s our first proposed draft and our request for comments :

More details in the helios project’s blog :
http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/heliosplatform/2010/06/04/first-draft-of-helios_bt-bug-ontology-request-for-comment/

LD2SD, Helios and Linked Data / SemWeb extracted from development forges

We have received a visitor from DERI last week (PhD student Aftab Iqbal) who’s researching integration of facts about software development tools into Linked Data in order to provide interesting “semantic mashups” of data into IDEs like Eclipse (see his slides). Quite interesting is the choice of ontologies and the results integrated in an Eclipse plugin made available to developers.

This approach is quite similar to the one we practice in the core of the Helios platform (still under development) to integrate data coming from different FLOSS ALM tools in order to create dashboards offering a consolidated view of software (maintenance) process.
Maybe the difference is that Helios does this internally inside a “self-contained” platform whereas the potential of LD2SD presented by Aftab is to do the same on the Web of Linked Data.

Also, in Helios, there are other contributions made for the Mandriva distribution (with links with projects like Scribo and Nepomuk to which Mandriva is also participating) in the form of the doc4.mandriva.org, in order to aggregate, this time, not facts at the “project” level, but for a meta-project (a GNU/Linux distribution) that are quite interesting. See Stéphane Laurière’s slides for details.

We’re also experimenting in the frame of the COCLICO project on producing RDFa data about software development projects hosted in FusionForge instances. (see our progress tracked through this FusionForge feature request). First candidates are project’s DOAP profiles and developer’s FOAF ones, and lots of SIOC to glue it all, and of course other informations relating to a Forge ontology that we’re proposing in COCLICO.

With recent announcements that Mylyn is investing a lot in OSLC, and OSLC being based on RDF, and the advent of the Semantic Desktop starting to emerge (in KDE mainly) on top of Nepomuk, this brings great promises for a great Semantic future.

New SF.net project for HELIOS

The Helios project is gradually going more open, as we start releasing and committing in the open into a SF.net project (heliosplatform).

Among the tools offered by SF.net we will use a blog (wordpress), the wiki (mediawiki) and the SVN, for a start.

The project’s SVN repo will be populated with all components we have developed, as we progressively switch our SVN hosting. The first piece we have committed is the Mantis OSLC REST server module.