[OSLC-CM] Seld-introduction, Helios_Bt bugs description ontology, etc.

[Olivier Berger]

Hello.

I've just joined this discussion list and will introduce myself/our
project briefly.


We're really interested in participating to interoperability and
standardization efforts in the area of bugtracker tools, so your
initiative looks really appealing.


For the records, I've just discovered this initiative through a common
commenting, together with Steve Speicher, on a bugzilla enhancement
request, very recently... and without prior hints that such a group was
working on similar subject as ours, although we've been working on
bugtracker interoperability for a little bit more than a year now
(probably in parallel universes ;-).


We're working, in the frame of the Helios project (about Open source
tools for ALM) on a work-package dedicated to bugtracker
interoperability, whose description is available here :
https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/ (also
TWiki based ;).


Among common interest with the current efforts in the OSLC CM group,
I've spotted the definition of a model/ontology/interchange format to
represent bug facts that we've also been working on.
The current state of our work is documented in
https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/HeliosBtOntology

(Actually, we've been in contact with other players working on a bug
representation interchange standard in the "baetle" project
(http://code.google.com/p/baetle/) and I'm a bit suprised we haven't
been in contact before through that other initivative. Anyway...)


Maybe you'd be interested in our contributions on bug modeling, for
instance if our model and yours are complementary ?

Something we've been studying (not yet properly documented, though) is
the modeling of links between (related) bugs filed in different
bugtrackers, like for instance along the distribution process, between
"upstream" projects' bugtrackers and GNU/Linux distributions
bugtrackers. I don't know if this has been adressed yet in your efforts
(having had too little time to read the wiki in details).


We're working at the moment on trying to map Open Source bugtrackers bug
models to this ontology (starting with Debian and Mandriva bugs) in
order to build new applications (which will be announced in the
following weeks). 
In the future we hope that there will be a common standard that could be
supported by most Open Source bugtrackers in the future, in order to
facilitate the QA process of Open Source maintainers, so as to avoid
potential duplication of (volunteer based) effort in such maintenance
(every packagers in every OSS distros are doing more or less the same
tasks in separate platforms at the moment).


Also one of the "side-effects" goals of our efforts is to facilitate the
"participation" of (public) bugs filed on open source projects to the
Semantic Web with the Linked Data approach.


To give you bits about where I'm talking from, Helios is an industry +
academia joint R&D project funded as part of french R&D clusters, and
we're an academic institution (Institut TELECOM) in France, leading this
WP. We've had, in our team at Institut TELECOM, a past record of
interest in many Open Source related matters, around process, software
engineering, collaboration, communities and software forges.


I'm not sure this introduction will be appealing to some of you, but we
would gladly welcome some comments on our results (the bug ontology
mentioned above mainly).


I hope we can identify interesting collaboration occasions in the future
on Change Management and other bugtracker matters.

Best regards,
-- 
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger at 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)