Hi. (message about UDD, CC-ed to qa list, although I'm not so sure it belongs here)
I've just already responded (Message-Id: <1234456666.7959.46.ca...@hortense>) to Enrico Zini on d...@l.d.o about the lack of semantics (in the sense of Semantic Web standards used to convey ontological references, like RDF schema, etc.) in the outputs of DDE, so this message's subject is quite similar. I guess the same kind of criticism indeed transitively applies to UDD (DDE exports UDD data, IIUC). The meaning of the data in the database comes from the choices done at database schema design time, and in the code that injects data to UDD (sometimes not in obvious ways, as it seems there are inconsistencies preventing links between tables, for good reasons). I'm thinking about trying to help improve that situation, maybe by providing some docs first (UML diagrams and more ?). The goal is to enable the use of "commonly agreed" semantics for representation of some data, at extraction time, for instance. For instance, that could imply mapping bug attributes to EvoOnt BOM (or baetle) ontology (http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/evo/). As a (rencent) maintainer of bts-link, and in the frame of project HELIOS (https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/) I'm thinking about mapping Debian "facts" to such standard ontologies. That would help for instance making semantic links between bugs in different bugtrackers in a more standard way, which would supposedly enable easier implementation if all bugtrackers understood the same RDF dialects, for instance. We're trying to evaluate the mapping of different bugtracker's data to EvoOnt at http://code.google.com/p/baetle/wiki/EvoOntBomMappings for instance (debbugs is on our list). I have written a short piece on the subject (http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/2009/02/10/udd-swim-flossmetrics-facts-databases-about-libre-software-distributions-going-semantic/) after the FOSDEM, and I'd like to get your comments on these ideas. Of course, more semantics may not be necessary from the strict immediate needs of Debian-specific tools. But I imagine that using standard representation formats (for the same semantics of similar objects), QA tools could be "ported" from distributions to other distributions, and eventually manage inter-distributions data. An immedate example would be sharing the "database" of links between related bugs (forwarded-to like) allover the net between all distributions bugtrackers, enabling maintainers to explore the graph of interrelated bugs to ease identification of similar work done by other maintainers. Comments, flames much welcome. Best regards, -- Olivier BERGER <olivier.ber...@it-sudparis.eu> http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-qa-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
