My WebLog at Intitut Mines-Telecom, Télécom SudParis
I’ve blogged often about our efforts around RDF and UDD in recent times.
This time, we have used triplify to export contents of some tables of the Debian UDD database to provide information about Debian bugs facts as RDF feeds (using our ontology based on EvoOnt BOM).
More details at : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/TriplifyUddToRdf including a link to the demonstration server.
In the “Development” track of the recent LSM/RMLL 2009, we (Stephane Laurière and me) have presented two related speeches, about the use of Semantic Web technology in the frame of Open Source projects development.
Stéphane presented SWIM : Semantic Web enabled Issue Manager, which presents an integration of Semantic Web techniques in the Mandriva community support site, and on the desktop. It’s based on results of projects Nepomuk, Helios and Scribo.
I have also presented Tracking bugs on the (Semantic) Web, which explores the use of Semantic Web techniques (RDF) as a mean to render bugtrackers interoperable, to be able to track bugs to the scale of the whole Semantic Web. This is also based on the work we do in the frame of the Helios project.
Enjoy the slides attached to the linked pages above.
… well, at least on my machine 😉
The goal is to be able to track remote bugs with bts-link even for your own list of (private) bugs that are not in debbugs (see also prevous post about this idea we work on in the Helios project).
Now, I have some bugs in Mantis, and I add a snippet like the following into one of its notes :
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
*** end bts-link-mantis ***
And starting from that point, bts-link is able to monitor the (remote) Debian bug it refers to, and notify people subscribed to the local Mantis bug.
When running and if the Debian bug status changes, it will add (via SOAP) another note with, for instance :
This is a note generated by bts-link :
remote status report for 0000029
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
* remote status changed: (?) -> pending
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
User-Tags: status-pending
*** end bts-link-mantis ***
The same principle would work with almost any bugtracker even if they don’t support forwarded-to tags or any similar remote bug tracking mechanism natively.
The code is here (git), for the curious ones.
EDIT 2009/07/03 : I announced this to the Mantis-dev list hoping there will be some feedback.
We want to be able to extend bts-link (or -like services) so that bugs linked between different bugtrackers can be linked to each-other and the status changes monitored, as part of our tasks in Helios (see LinkedBugsMonitoring).
We’ll probably try and work, until July, on connecting to Mantis as the “distribution/downstream” bugtracker instead of debbugs, and see what architectural changes would be required to test that for the Helios platform specific needs.
I’d like to be able to have a working prototype for July, which would also demonstrate the LinkedData and Semantic Web approach to navigating the bugs of the open source ecosystem, so that we can discuss it at the Debconf. I’ve filed a proposal for a paper at DebConf for this purpose : towards more semantic web into Debian servers (UDD and likes) (see previous post on that matter also).
I suppose that our Mandriva colleagues will be able to move on on bugzilla for SWIM/Mephisto so that we can quickly have very interesting prototypes.
I miss time to describe all that in more details (and will appreciate the coming holidays week 😉 ).
Comments welcome, of course.
Just a quick message to announce the start of Helios project, whose kick-off occurred yesterday in THALES premises in Palaiseau.
The team is enthuisastic, I think, and I hope we’ll be able to provide usefull integrated tools for Application Lifecycle Management based on Open source tools.
I hope the work we’ll be doing on bug trackers will help improve the process of bug fixing in open source projects and distributions too.
The project doesn’t have a website yet, but things will be setup soon.
More on Helios later in this blog. Stay tuned.