Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and Practice

Several public repositories and archives of "facts" about libre software projects, maintained either by open source communities or by research communities, have been flourishing over the Web in recent years. These have enabled new analysis and support for new quality assurance tasks. This paper presents some complementary existing tools, projects and models proposed both by OSS actors or research initiatives that are likely to lead to useful future developments in terms of study of the FLOSS phenomenon, and also to the very practitioners in the FLOSS development projects. A goal of the research conducted within the HELIOS project is to address bugs traceability issues. In this regard, the authors investigate the potential of using Semantic Web technologies in navigating between many different bugtracker systems scattered all over the open source ecosystem. By using Semantic Web techniques, it is possible to interconnect the databases containing data about open-source software projects development, which enables OSS partakers to identify resources, annotate them, and further interlink those using dedicated properties and collectively designing a distributed semantic graph.