From the LOD mailing-list, I discovered and browsed doapspace.org, that aims to build a DOAP repository. Contrary to doap:store that fetches RDF files from the Web thanks to PTSW, one of the nice feature of doapspace is that it creates DOAP files from services that do not offer such meta-data for their projects, such as SourceForge or FreshMeat.
Rob already scrapped about 45000 DOAP files ! And should be able in a few days to ping PTSW to inform it about new files, that can the be crawled into doap:store, browsed… and SPARQLed – let’s hope my box can support such amount of data and queries…
As discussed on the mailing-list, this service could be a great way to make DOAP enter one step further into the Linked Data Web. What’s currently missing is URIs, for projects and people. I noticed when creating doap:store that many projects don’t have an URI (and are just blank nodes), which makes impossible to link to them from external files, as FOAF profiles.
Now, imagine that doapspace scrapper creates URI for all people and projects, based on the service name and user / project id on the original service. Using owl:sameAs and rdfs:seeAlso, anyone could add something like this in its FOAF profile:
<foaf:Person rdf:about="#me">
<owl:sameAs
rdf:resource="http://doapspace.org/user/sf/terraces"
rdf:seeAlso="http://doapspace.org/user/sf/terraces/rdfview"/>
<owl:sameAs
rdf:resource="http://doapspace.org/user/fm/terraces"
rdf:seeAlso="http://doapspace.org/user/fm/terraces/rdfview"/>
</foaf:Person>
Then, by reading my FOAF profile with Tabulator or any Linked Data Browser I can easilly browse my profiles on doapspace, that would ideally list all projects (with their URIs) I’m into and that I can browse again, thanks again to seeAlso links.
Another advantage is that I don’t have to mention the projects I maintain in my FOAF file, but let doapspace do the job for me, since using owl:sameAs will tell that these different URIs identify the same person (= me). Then using a single SPARQL query on these files with an engine that supports owl:sameAs, I can easilly find all projects I’m into, whereas it comes from:
select ?project
where {
?project doap:maintainer <my_foaf_URI>
}
The final step would be to query only my FOAF profile, and let the engine discover / identify doapspace URIs and retrieve profiles to add them in its files to query, as the Semantic Web Client library does, but I don’t know if it currently supports owl:sameAs or not.
