Category: Uncategorized

Helios day 1

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.

More RDF in forges and in open source repositories of repositories

We have presented a paper at the WopDasD 2008 workshop (right after the OSS 2008 conference) in Milano, explaining how RDF could be used to propagate semantically tagged information from the forges to the “repositories of repositories” collecting facts on open-source projects, and advocating to tighter integration of the forges and the research analysis tools.

I was glad that another presentation was made by Kevin Crowston for a paper written by James Howison about the use of RDF semantic schemas to bring more interoperability between the various repositories of repositories (Update 2008/09/22 : slides here). Btw, they explained what RDF is in the slides just before me, so I got more time to talk about the rest 😉

Also quite interesting was the presentation made by Andrea Wiggins for their paper about the workflow for scientific analysis in these repositories of repositories. I guess there’s some momentum towards more interoperability and more integration here. Maybe some web services could interoperate between what’s on the forges and what’s on the repository of repositories.

Training bayesian filters to recognize discussion topics in mailing list archives ?

We’ve discussed this idea at the OSS2008 WoPDaSD 2008 workshop with Sander Striker, and I’d be curious to know if it’s been attempted to analyse contents of mailing-lists with bayesian filter of spamassassin in order to detect particular topics of discussion, instead of filtering out spam.

Sometimes researchers on FLOSS projects try to analyse mailing-lists to detect communication patterns.

Maybe spamassassin could be used as a common bayesian analyser to be train to recognize subjects of discussions in order to help detect common topics in mailing-lists ? Of course this may have allready been tried… will be curious of our comments on that idea.

Update 2008/09/22 : more accurate title, as it is not all about spamassassin (see comment bellow).

Introducing repository of reasearch papers at flossplanet.org

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.

New Debian package for twiki-ldapcontrib 2.99.5, new RFS

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/