Supporting Situation Awareness in FLOSS Projects by Semantical Aggregation of Tools Feeds

It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a collaboration project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that uses 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, FOAF and EvoOnt. Resulting data can then be processed, re-published or displayed to project members. This approach was used to implement a supervision module that is integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able to draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn exports semantic feeds for other uses.