[doap-interest] [PROPOSAL] Adding dependency support to DOAP ontology

Sander W G van der Waal sander.vanderwaal at oucs.ox.ac.uk
Fri Jul 30 17:54:25 CEST 2010


Hi all,

According to the mailing list archives the need for recording project 
dependency information in DOAP has been discussed a few times in the 
past (eg. [1,2]). 

In the Simal project [3] we record and expose DOAP data about software 
projects and we try to find meaningful relationships between projects. 
Being able to record that project A depends on project B would be 
extremely useful for our use cases. 

I am aware that there are many possible approaches to this, but to me
the most elegant and straight-forward approach seems to be to simply say 
that Project A depends on Project B, or expressed in RDF/XML (similar to 
[1]): 

<Project rdf:about="http://myproject.org">
  ...
  <dependency>
    <Project rdf:about="http://python.org" />
  </dependency>
</Project>

For the DOAP ontology definition this would result in a new rdf:Property 
named 'dependency' with rdfs:range and rdfs:domain both doap:Project. In 
the hope to be helpful I added a patch to the issue tracker [4] in which 
this property is added to the doap.rdf. 

I look forward to your thoughts on this and hope the ability to record 
project dependencies can be added to DOAP soon.

Thanks,

Sander van der Waal

[1] http://lists.usefulinc.com/pipermail/doap-interest/2009-September/000380.html 
[2] http://lists.usefulinc.com/pipermail/doap-interest/2009-August/000378.html
[3] http://simal.googlecode.com 
[4] http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap/ticket/12

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