Improving community awareness in software forges by semantical aggregation of tools feeds

It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that use Wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools. This paper presents an approach to data collection by using aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, and FOAF. Resulting data can then be processed, republished or displayed to project members. We implemented this approach in a supervision module that has been integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able do draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn export semantic feeds for other uses.