First draft of Helios_bt bug ontology : request for comment

We’ve been working on modeling bug reports properties for quite a long time, but never managed to stabilize an ontology specification. Better late than never, here’s our first proposed draft and our request for comments :

More details in the helios project’s blog :
http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/heliosplatform/2010/06/04/first-draft-of-helios_bt-bug-ontology-request-for-comment/

New OAuth plugin for Mantis

I’ve been working on implementing a (my first) plugin for Mantis to provide OAuth support in Mantis.

I now have a first 0.5 version that may be tested. More details here.

Nest step will be to try and use it for the OSLC-CM REST server add-on for Mantis, to allow clients to connect to the REST API using OAuth Access Tokens.

Some news of our efforts around OSLC-CM and future plans

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we’ve been very interested in it.

OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we’ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that’s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools.

At the same time we’ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions 🙂

Now that this works, we’ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn… hmmm… well, we’ll see.

Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link.

Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually.

Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.

Very interesting presentations this morning at OWF about the future of the Semantic Desktop

I’ve attended this morning the OWF session on the future Semantic Desktops, with excellent presentations by Stefan Decker (DERI) on the concepts of the Semantic Web and the Social Semantic Desktop, by the Zeitgeist project guys (Seif Lofty and Alexander Gabriel), and finally by Sebastian Trüg demonstrating the Nepomuk semantic desktop components in KDE.

It was a good occasion to meet these people (together with Henry Story) and talk a little bit about our efforts in the area of bugtracking and Semantic Web, and to discuss the future of the Baetle ontology, and do more teasing for fetchbugs4.me.

I hope some day, we integrate the models and tools so that bugs filed on bugtrackers can be referenced and manipulated with Desktop tools through interoperable APIs and common ontologies. More work ahead of us in Helios 🙂

Triplification / RDF extraction for bugzillas and for Debian bugs

To summarize some ideas and try and promote the work we’ve done in the frame of Helios, we’ve submitted a short paper (PDF) to the triplification challenge.

Alas, others had better projects, and we didn’t win, apparently. Still, we’ll continue to work beyond these initial demonstrators, in order to try and push for a standard of interchange of “facts” / meta-data about bugs, for instance as RDF using the EvoOnt BOM ontology plus our extensions.

The paper describes the 2 first demonstrators that we’ve setup (and for which I previously blogged) : one for the triplification of bugzilla, and one for the triplification about Debian bugs, using UDD to do so.

Abstract: To interconnect bugtrackers, and especially the one used to manage free
software projects, one need tools to convert their custom format to a common interop-
erable form. We, in the context of the Helios project, are working on refining existing
ontologies to describe bugs from the most used bugtrackers in open source software. We
propose two prototypes for review, based on triplify and EvoOnt BOM, which export
bugs from bugzilla installations and Debian’s UDD in the form of RDF triples.

Read the rest in “Bugtrackers triplification” (PDF)