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We have received a visitor from DERI last week (PhD student Aftab Iqbal) who’s researching integration of facts about software development tools into Linked Data in order to provide interesting “semantic mashups” of data into IDEs like Eclipse (see his slides). Quite interesting is the choice of ontologies and the results integrated in an Eclipse plugin made available to developers.

This approach is quite similar to the one we practice in the core of the Helios platform (still under development) to integrate data coming from different FLOSS ALM tools in order to create dashboards offering a consolidated view of software (maintenance) process.
Maybe the difference is that Helios does this internally inside a “self-contained” platform whereas the potential of LD2SD presented by Aftab is to do the same on the Web of Linked Data.

Also, in Helios, there are other contributions made for the Mandriva distribution (with links with projects like Scribo and Nepomuk to which Mandriva is also participating) in the form of the doc4.mandriva.org, in order to aggregate, this time, not facts at the “project” level, but for a meta-project (a GNU/Linux distribution) that are quite interesting. See Stéphane Laurière’s slides for details.

We’re also experimenting in the frame of the COCLICO project on producing RDFa data about software development projects hosted in FusionForge instances. (see our progress tracked through this FusionForge feature request). First candidates are project’s DOAP profiles and developer’s FOAF ones, and lots of SIOC to glue it all, and of course other informations relating to a Forge ontology that we’re proposing in COCLICO.

With recent announcements that Mylyn is investing a lot in OSLC, and OSLC being based on RDF, and the advent of the Semantic Desktop starting to emerge (in KDE mainly) on top of Nepomuk, this brings great promises for a great Semantic future.