Re: Requiring DOAP instead of MAINTAINERS file

[Wouter Bolsterlee <uws+gnome xs4all nl>]

2008-01-18 klockan 09:49 skrev Olav Vitters:
> Summary: I'd like replace the MAINTAINERS requirement by doap files.
> Comments welcome.

(I'm replying to the initial message since this is a reply to the thread as a
whole.)

The main issue seems to be the "ugliness" of the DOAP format. Well, DOAP is
just a small ontology based on RDF, and RDF has many syntaxes, RDF-XML being
just one. Additionally, the same information, i.e. all (subject, predicate,
object) triples in a graph, can be serialized into different RDF-XML
representation. RDF-XML is by no means a canonical representation.

But let's get back to my first note: RDF-XML is just one of many RDF
representations. May I suggest Turtle [1] (or N3 [2], but I prefer Turtle for
various reasons).

The description of a project will then look something like the example below.
Note that this is valid Turtle syntax---copy/paste at [3] to check.

  @prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
  @prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
  @prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
  @prefix doap: <http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#> .
  @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .

  <http://clutter-project.org/> 
    a doap:Project ;
    doap:name "Clutter" ;
    doap:shortname "clutter" ;
    doap:created "2006-11-18" ;
    doap:shortdesc "Clutter is an OpenGL based interface library"@en,
                   "Clutter is een OpenGL-gebaseerde interfacebibliotheek"@nl ;

    doap:homepage <http://www.clutter-project.org> ;
    doap:download-page <http://www.clutter-project.org/sources> ;
    doap:license <http://usefulinc.com/doap/licenses/lgpl> ;
    doap:bug-database <http://bugzilla.o-hand.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Clutter> ;
    doap:mailing-list <mailto:clutter+subscribe o-hand com> ;

    doap:os "Linux" ;
    doap:programming-language "C" ;

    doap:repository [
      a doap:SVNRepository ;
      doap:browse <http://svn.o-hand.com/view/clutter> ;
      doap:location <https://svn.o-hand.com/repos/clutter>
    ] .

Personally I think this is better for human editors than RDF-XML.

Feedback welcome.

  mvrgr, Wouter

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(syntax)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_3
[3] http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/validator/
-- 
:wq                                                       mail uws xs4all nl
                                                      web http://uwstopia.nl

i'll be your sun coming up :: i'll be your dark days         -- heather nova

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature