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 :