My presentation about COCLICO and forges interoperability at OWF 2010

I’ve given a talk on Friday 1st of October at Open World Forum 2010 (OWF) in the (not necessary all so much) Open Forges Think Tank track on behalf of the COCLICO project and some of our (or mine) ideas on forges interoperability.

I’ll try and prepare a more detailed textual version of all these ideas (worth adding to the project deliverables maybe ?), but here’s already a link to the slides (attention: 5 Mb). Actually I’ve slightly modified them after my speech before posting them, as I added some more comments in last minute that may have deserved a bullet of their own. EDIT: I’ve finally posted a textual version of my ideas.

Here’s also a crappy preview online, as it seems slideshare doesn’t like the fonts used by this beamer presentation :

“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”

OpenForge API

I’m passing the word about the OpenForge initiative whose goal is apparently try and foster interoperability between forges. Thanks to Nicolas Guerin for the pointer.

Great, I’ll keep an eye on that.

Excerpt from http://openforge.info/ :

OpenForge is an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows different development forges to communicate with each other. All the work is focused on interoperability. With this API, you can imagine a lot of features based on the aims:

* retrieve project’s datas
* retrieve user’s datas
* search for a user or a project

Quite similar to ideas entertained at wiki.planetforge.org

More RDF in forges and in open source repositories of repositories

We have presented a paper at the WopDasD 2008 workshop (right after the OSS 2008 conference) in Milano, explaining how RDF could be used to propagate semantically tagged information from the forges to the “repositories of repositories” collecting facts on open-source projects, and advocating to tighter integration of the forges and the research analysis tools.

I was glad that another presentation was made by Kevin Crowston for a paper written by James Howison about the use of RDF semantic schemas to bring more interoperability between the various repositories of repositories (Update 2008/09/22 : slides here). Btw, they explained what RDF is in the slides just before me, so I got more time to talk about the rest 😉

Also quite interesting was the presentation made by Andrea Wiggins for their paper about the workflow for scientific analysis in these repositories of repositories. I guess there’s some momentum towards more interoperability and more integration here. Maybe some web services could interoperate between what’s on the forges and what’s on the repository of repositories.

Paper accepted at WoPDaSD 2008 : “Improving community awareness in software forges by semantical aggregation of tools feeds”

We (Vu, Christian, Sang and me) have written a paper which was accepted for the fore-coming WoPDaSD 2008 workshop (3nd International Workshop on Public Data about Software Development), later this year in Milano.

Here’s the abstract :

Improving community awareness in software forges by
semantical aggregation of tools feeds

It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the
contribution of a member in a project, especially when the
project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case
for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that use Wiki,
bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools.
This paper presents an approach to data collection by using
aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software
forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically
reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, and
FOAF. Resulting data can then be processed, republished or
displayed to project members. We implemented this approach in a
supervision module that has been integrated into the PicoForge
platform. This module is able do draw a live graph of the social
community out of the different sources of data, and in turn export
semantic feeds for other uses.

I hope we will be able to confront this approach to others’ in order to see if this is a valid strategy to enhance the use of the forges and better interoperate between tools.

Update 2008/09/10 : the paper is now online.

… and the slides are now online on the workshop site, or bellow :