Weaving a Semantic Web across OSS repositories: unleashing a new potential for academia and practice

Abstract:  Several public repositories and archives of “facts” about libre software projects, maintained either by open source communities or by research communities, have been flourishing over the Web in the recent years. These have enable new analysis and support new quality assurance tasks.

This paper presents some complementary existing tools, projects and models proposed both by OSS actors or research initiatives, that are likely to lead to useful future developments in terms of study of the FLOSS phenomenon, and also to the very practitioners in the FLOSS development projects, provided that interoperability is fostered at all places.

A goal of the research conducted within the HELIOS project, is to address bugs traceability issues. For that, we investigate the potential of using Semantic Web technologies in navigating between many different bugtracker systems scattered all over the open source ecosystem.

By using Semantic Web techniques, it is possible to interconnect the databases containing data about open-source software projects development, hence letting OSS partakers identify resources, annotate them, and further interlink them using dedicated properties, collectively designing a distributed semantic graph. Such links expressed with standard Semantic techniques are paving the way to new applications (including ones meant for “end-users”). For instance this may have an impact on the way research efforts are conducted (less fragmented), and could also be used by development communities to improve Quality Assurance tasks.