Semantic Interoperability Problem of OSS Forges

Interoperability between collaborative development platforms (forges) in the Open Source Software world is a significant issue. The forges tend to follow the lock-in phenomenon, providing no easy-to-use facilities for migrating projects or their parts between forge platforms. To facilitate the process of cross-forge project migration, the following paper presents an approach of lifting forge data models to the semantic level and applying rule-based mappings for their alignment. The approach also involves Semantic Web Services to handle the process of importing/exporting project metadata from/to Open Source Software forges. Finally, the paper demonstrates the approach on the basis of proof-of-concept implementation exploiting the existing forges and presents the lessons learnt.