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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 🙂

I’ll be speaking about bugs, Helios, fetchbugs4.me at OSDC.fr

I’ll be giving a speech on Saturday about our efforts in Helios to foster interoperability between bugtrackers and bugs modeling on the Semantic Web : Bugtracking sur le web sémantique. See you in La cité des Sciences in Paris Saturday at 14:00 (free entrance).

Converting Sympa GET-ed digests to mbox for swaml processing

Sympa (the mailing-list manager) can send you digests of previous posts with the GET command (also useful the LIST command).

The messages are not in mbox format that could be processed directly by swaml, but as a multipart digest email containing all the past emails sent to the list as MIME attachments.

I adapted the mailextract.py script (here’s the patch) to produce a file that’s almost a mbox, which can then be processed by formail (a procmail‘s command, with formail -ds) to reconstruct a proper mbox.

Here’s then the command-line to obtain a mbox :
python mailextract.py -u source_of_get-ed_email | formail -ds >archive.mbox

Then swaml can be used to process that mbox, in order to obtain RDF documents for the mailing-list posts.

Easy 😉

COCLICO start : we’ll finally held the kickoff soon

The COCLICO (yes, we’ll have a website soon, I hope) R&D project in the french cluster on FLOSS has been setup quite a long time ago, and we’ve awaited anxiously the time we could start working on it.

Several hazards happened in the way when some initial partners withdrew from the final consortium. Hopefully, we managed to make it anyway, by replacing them on some key tasks, and we’ll probably be able to run the project anyway.

So we’ll finally have the kickoff meeting on early october, and will finally start working on fostering the libre forges ecosystem.

I hope this will provide useful contributions to the community and to FLOSS in general, alhough we’ll have to overcome the difficulties in such collaboration projects before we can deliver real concrete things (like establishing common work practices, agreeing on tasks to be done, building trust, maximizing meetings efficiency, having a good signal/noise ratio, and generally produce good FLOSS quality even though not everybody have the same constraints). I hope we’ll be able to stick to a release early + release often habit anyway.

Looking forward to tell you more about it once we’ve started.