Sharing data, how and what?
rgardler
time to get the ball rolling.
It was agreed at the meeting that we all need access to basic project
information data. In the case of JISC funded projects this data is
collected by the JISC themselves and includes information such as
project name, start and end date, participants etc. Most of this
information is already available via resources such as the JISC "what
we do" pages, or project forges such as Sourceforge and Google Code.
DOAP [1] provides a standard way of encoding this data in a machine
readable format. For a full examination of the DOAP schema see [2],
but I give an overview of what can be captured in [4], I've removed
some of the less important items (such as specific version control
entries). It's worth noting that DOAP was originally created to
capture information about software development projects, however,
there is no reason why it should be restricted to that since it is an
RDF format and thus can be extended with other relevant RDF schemas
such as Dublin Core to capture information about other types of
project and its outputs. An example of this can be seen in the data
DOAP holds about people, it only records their role within the
project, but relies upon FOAF to describe the actual people.
Using this schema Simal [3] is capturing a great deal of information
about JISC projects including the JISC theme and funding stream.
What else needs to be collected that is not captured by this schema?
One suggestion is project start and end date.
Please let us know what each of your projects needs to capture, we can
then identify a way for capturing that data and ensure that we are all
using the same RDF schema for data transfer.
[1] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/doap.xml
[2] http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/ws/2003/01/rdfs/?rdfs=http%3A%2F%2Fusefulinc.com%2Fns%2Fdoap%23
[3] http://data.oss-watch.ac.uk:8080/project/detail/simalID/1
[4] http://code.google.com/p/simal/wiki/Schema
rgardler
> Now that the majority of attendees at our meeting are present it is
> time to get the ball rolling.
> Please let us know what each of your projects needs to capture, we can
> then identify a way for capturing that data and ensure that we are all
> using the same RDF schema for data transfer.
interest in clearly defining what data is needed and what we are
willing to share, but now there is silence. Lets at least agree on a
data format for sharing our data needs. Once we've done that we can
start actually sharing data and stopping all this duplication.
Ross
[4] http://code.google.com/p/simal/wiki/Schema
Phil Nicholls
We're going to be getting more involved with this during october -
when we'll be working out preciesly which e-fwk information we need to
capture and share.
In the meantime, I am watching...
Phil
Simone Spencer
Ross Gardler
> Hi Ross,
>
> We're going to be getting more involved with this during october -
> when we'll be working out preciesly which e-fwk information we need to
> capture and share.
>
> In the meantime, I am watching...
Fair enough. Thanks for letting me know, as long as I'm not talking to
myself I'm happy ;-)
If you get a chance to play with the 0.2 release and providing a little
early feedback that would be really helpful. You don't need to install
it, you can always play with it at http://data.oss-watch.ac.uk:8080
Ross
Sam Easterby-Smith
@simone - Ohloh is a big directory of open source projects (from the
world in general) which does many cool and interesting things like
counting the lines of code and working out how many person-hours went
in to making it:
http://ohloh.net
I wrote a blog post about it and much of what we've been talking about
re this integration work and my project some time last year:
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/sam/2007/03/21/out-of-my-mind-on-doap-and-ohloh/
@ross - I can't get to the SIMAL page on your server - presumably port
8080 is firewalled up?
Sam
Ross Gardler
> I don't think your link [3] is working
>
Sorry - I linked to a specific resource, but the database in the demo is
cleaned regularly (to remove spam) and resources therefore disappear.
Here is a constant URL that will never go away:
http://data.oss-watch.ac.uk:8080/projectBrowser
Ross
Ross Gardler
> @ross - I can't get to the SIMAL page on your server - presumably port
> 8080 is firewalled up?
No, see my overlapping response to Simone, use
http://data.oss-watch.ac.uk:8080/projectBrowser