Edd Dumbill, Principal, Useful Information Company
Track: XML
Date: Thursday, July 29
Time: 10:45am - 11:30am
Location: Eugene
TrackBack
DOAP (Description of a Project) is a free XML format and toolset that provides a computer-readable description of project's public resources. Taking inspiration from the successful Friend-of-a-Friend project, DOAP will allow project maintainers to write only one project description and allow it to be read by software registries such as Freshmeat, as well as any other interested party.
This talk describes DOAP's goals and development process, the DOAP vocabulary, and the tools available to use DOAP descriptions.
"This is a project of my own construction," notes Dumbill, "intended to make it easier for open source software maintainers to share information about their project. It's inspired by the social software Friend-of-a-Friend
project, where people make XML/RDF files to describe themselves,
their interests, and link to their friends. DOAP files are similar,
but they're about open source software projects. This means that news
sites and software directories can automatically pick up on information
about projects. I'm hoping that open source developers at the conference
will identify with the aim of lessening the trouble of maintaining
project metadata at multiple software directories and news sites. I
also want to catalyze hackers to write tools to do cool things with
DOAP. For instance, attendees will learn to how write DOAP files for their own
projects and hook into a network of sites that can read them and
distribute information about their projects."
