DOAP: Description of a Project
Welcome to the DOAP home page. DOAP is a project to create an XML/RDF vocabulary to describe open source projects.
In addition to developing an RDF schema and examples, the DOAP project aims to provide tool support in all the popular programming languages.
Latest News
Danny Ayers has posted a handy example of how to mix the DOAP vocabulary with FOAF and RSS 1.0 to link weblogs and RSS feeds from a DOAP description.
Vincent Tabard has announced his DOAP Validator. He writes:
It tries to validate XML, RDF and (sorta) semantic "correctness" atm. The last one uses an RDQL query to check the presence of doap:name, doap:homepage and doap:description (or doap:shortdesc).
For projects such as these validators it would be useful to collect a lot of test cases, both valid and invalid, and make them available as part of the DOAP distribution.
If you are interested in helping with this, please send any test cases to the mailing list or directly to Edd Dumbill.
Niel Bornstein has started work on code that will let you embed DOAP information in a CLR assembly. As well as definitions of Attributes for DOAP terms, there's a tool which reflects on an assembly and produces a DOAP file.
The code is publically available from the DOAP subversion repository, but it still a work in progress. Comments should be sent to the doap-interest mailing list.
Danny O'Brien has posted a good report on Edd Dumbill's DOAP talk at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
The slides are also available for download, in OpenOffice.org Impress format. However, they're not really as informative as reading the developerWorks articles on DOAP.
In other news, more URIs have been added to the licenses page, to cover the Apache License, W3C License and Mozilla Public License.
Edd Dumbill has published part 4 of his series on the DOAP vocabulary at IBM developerWorks. This final article in the DOAP series covers the bootstrapping and launch of the DOAP project.
Things are moving fast in the DOAP world! Christopher Schmidt announced a Firefox extension for DOAP. This a little icon in the bottom right of the browser that lights up when the page you're viewing has linked DOAP information. Clicking on the icon takes you to a view of the DOAP file.
Exciting stuff! One nice extension to this would be to pop up the view of the file in the sidebar. The DOAP extension uses the current working draft for a DOAP logo. If you've got any ideas for a DOAP logo, do submit candidate drawings to the mailing list.
Edd Dumbill will be presenting DOAP at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention next week, in Portland, OR, USA. The talk will be held at 10.45am, Salon B, on Thursday July 29. Edd will talk about the goals, design and progress of the DOAP project.
Vincent Tabard has mailed the doap-interest list with news of his DOAP-a-matic web page, which allows you to create simple DOAP files. Comments are welcome to the mailing list, or to Vincent's blog.
Once your DOAP file is made, you can link it into your HTML page by using the following
link tag in the head section of your page, substituting the right href value:
<link rel="meta" title="DOAP" type="application/rdf+xml"
href="http://.../doap.rdf" />
If anyone feels like doing some hacking, it'd be neat to see a Firefox extension that picked up on the DOAP link and displayed a nice informational sidebar for project home pages.
An index of DOAP licenses is now available.
These are to be used as the value of the doap:license property
in a DOAP file. The list of well-known URIs will expand in future
to accommodate the common open source licenses. It's also
possible to use the Creative Commons license URIs as well.
The DOAP project now has a public access mailing list. Anyone interested in deploying DOAP or writing software for it should subscribe.