WP2 : Interoperability and data exchange

The goal of this subproject is to establish a proposal for an interoperability standard for exchange of data between software development forges.

Every collaborative and software development project (FLOSS or not) that is hosted on a forge is made up of a participants community who share on the same platform the whole of the project informations (electronic communication archives, documents, software sources, software packages, bugs database, website, tasks lists, roles of participants, etc.).

However, once a project is established inside a forge, it becomes strongly connected to this forge. The project life may sometimes require a restructuring of the community limits, hence of the tools it uses : splitting a project, or aggregation of projects, change of tools (i.e. of forge) to address new needs, structural changes of the organizations that host the projects, etc.

This too strong rigidity is a problem today for the projects that use the forges, as well as for the organizations willing to deploy forges and anticipating the evolution of the platforms. The existing forges lack of administering features allowing the import, export and migration of projects or teams between forges.

So interoperability between software forges is fundamental to render links between projects and forges much more flexible.

The data of a project are stored in the specific formats of the different databases and storage files of the individual software that make up the forges. These storage formats, internal, are thus not adapted for a unified exchange format, standardized, pivot of interoperability between different platforms.

The challenge is then to define a standardized, open, exchanged format, that is capable to represent with common semantics the whole of the data of a project, a community, and to propose minimal implementations for at least two forges in order to validate this proposal from a technical point of view.

Subproject 2 will take into account works undertaken in the frame of QualiPSo on ontologies for the definition of the exchange format and will rely as much as possible on the practical guides and recommendations for interoperability issued by this project. Subproject 2 will also take advantage of the experiment on a demonstrator setup in QualiPSo to demonstrate how to use the semantic technologies for search between BerliOS and GForge and will evaluate the reusable mechanisms that can be generalised in the forges.