[doap-interest] Project relationships and funding

[Stuart Yeates]

Jorge Santos wrote:
> 
> 
> On 7/17/07, *Stuart Yeates* <stuart.yeates at oucs.ox.ac.uk
> <mailto:stuart.yeates at oucs.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Simal[0] is an embryonic project catalog application. We're
>     using  RDF/DOAP but we'd like to extend it in two directions. The
>     first is project dependency and the second is project funding. We
>     like input / debate. Ideally these would be in the main DOAP namesape.
> 
>     <rdf:Property rdf:about="http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#DependsOn">
>             <rdfs:isDefinedBy rdf:resource="
>     http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#" />
> 
>             <rdfs:label xml:lang="en">Depends on</rdfs:label>
>             <rdfs:label xml:lang="fr">?</rdfs:label>
>             <rdfs:label xml:lang="es">?</rdfs:label>
>             <rdfs:comment xml:lang="en">A project which this project
>     depends upon. Thus the Linux Kernel depends on GCC, because the
>     Kernel only compiles correctly (and is tested against) GCC and  the
>     various apache HTTPD modules depend on the HTTPD itself because they
>     are useless in practice without it. </rdfs:comment>
>             <rdfs:comment xml:lang="fr">?</rdfs:comment>
>             <rdfs:comment xml:lang="es">?</rdfs:comment>
> 
>             <rdf:type rdf:resource="
>     http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#TransitiveProperty" />
>             <rdfs:domain
>     rdf:resource="http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#Project" />
>             <rdfs:range rdf:resource="
>     http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#Project" />
>     </rdf:Property>
> 
> 
> 
> You may want to distinguish between runtime dependencies and buildtime
> dependencies, you never know what information may end up being used for,
> and the more you have (within reason) the better.  So in your example,
> gcc is a buildtime dependency for the Linux kernel and httpd is a
> runtime dependency for httpd modules.

You're right, there is potentially a great deal of useful
information here, but a number of projects have attempted to capture
this in XML. Either they've failed (in which case I think we should
steer well clear of the area) or they have succeeded (in which case
there is no reason for us to explore the area further).

Your proposal also assumes that dependsOn means "the software
outputs of project Y must be installed for the software outputs of
project X to be compiled / run." My proposal is more general and
includes other cases, such as the case where two projects one
implementing a client and the other the corresponding server.

cheers
stuart
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