My WebLog at Intitut Mines-Telecom, Télécom SudParis
In addition to the venerable Planet FLOSS research blog agregator, there’s a new tool setup in order to facilitate the work of the FLOSS research community : http://flossplanet.org/.
It’s actually a research papers (and other items) repository operated with GNU Eprints. Very good news, which should help manage bibliographic elements and other research artifacts.
We have setup a collaborative maintenance project named pkg-cas for Debian.
The goal is to have more packages available in Debian to be able to use the CAS SSO (Single Sign On) framework for web applications.
More details at : http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCASPackaging
Feel free to join !
Just a note to tell that I updated my packaging of twiki-ldapcontrib in order to try and push it to Debian’s official pool.
Now we’re in sync with upstream’s latest version (2.99.5).
I hope I find a sponsor 😉
More details at : http://picoforge.int-evry.fr/projects/twldapdeb/
We’ve been setting-up the codename HELIOS project, together with other partners (lead by Thales), which got funded recently, as part of the pôle de compétitivité System@tic (libre software thematics).
That means that our PFTCR team at Institut TELECOM will be able to do more research around infrastructure and process of production for libre software projects.
Among the things we’ll focus in particular in this 2 year project, is the topic of traceability between bugtrackers (WP3). This topic seems quite interesting to many people I’m talking to at the moment in libre software projects (as discussed recently at RMLL/LSM) : good 😉
I hope we’ll be able to help improve the current state of the art where lots of manual synchroniation is done in libre software (between upstream bugtrackers and distributions’ ones, for instance), and deliver useful tool to the communities.
We’ll keep you posted as the project moves on (scheduled kickstart september 2008).
For more details (in french), you may see the brochure (page 4) at System@tic’s site.
Update 2008/09/17 : here’s the official description of the project we’ve just drafted :
HELIOS is a project related to the System@tic research cluster. The aim of the project is to provide an Open Source ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) portal allowing to test, integrate, configure and maintain the many components of an application. HELIOS must be flexible and extensible enough to adapt to any tool with limited developpements in order for the users to keep on using their own tools. In the same way, flexibility and extensibility should allow services providers to build commercial offer. Most of existing ALM tools are specialised into one particular field (requirements management, qualification, project management, …) but the HELIOS project will aim at providing a complete platform covering activities from qualification to maintenance.
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 feedsIt 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 on the workshop site, or bellow :