I’ll be giving a speech on Saturday about our efforts in Helios to foster interoperability between bugtrackers and bugs modeling on the Semantic Web : Bugtracking sur le web sémantique. See you in La cité des Sciences in Paris Saturday at 14:00 (free entrance).
29/09/2009
19/09/2009
Converting Sympa GET-ed digests to mbox for swaml processing
Sympa (the mailing-list manager) can send you digests of previous posts with the GET command (also useful the LIST command).
The messages are not in mbox format that could be processed directly by swaml, but as a multipart digest email containing all the past emails sent to the list as MIME attachments.
I adapted the mailextract.py script (here’s the patch) to produce a file that’s almost a mbox, which can then be processed by formail (a procmail’s command, with formail -ds) to reconstruct a proper mbox.
Here’s then the command-line to obtain a mbox :
python mailextract.py -u source_of_get-ed_email | formail -ds >archive.mbox
Then swaml can be used to process that mbox, in order to obtain RDF documents for the mailing-list posts.
Easy 
18/09/2009
COCLICO start : we’ll finally held the kickoff soon
The COCLICO (yes, we’ll have a website soon, I hope) R&D project in the french cluster on FLOSS has been setup quite a long time ago, and we’ve awaited anxiously the time we could start working on it.
Several hazards happened in the way when some initial partners withdrew from the final consortium. Hopefully, we managed to make it anyway, by replacing them on some key tasks, and we’ll probably be able to run the project anyway.
So we’ll finally have the kickoff meeting on early october, and will finally start working on fostering the libre forges ecosystem.
I hope this will provide useful contributions to the community and to FLOSS in general, alhough we’ll have to overcome the difficulties in such collaboration projects before we can deliver real concrete things (like establishing common work practices, agreeing on tasks to be done, building trust, maximizing meetings efficiency, having a good signal/noise ratio, and generally produce good FLOSS quality even though not everybody have the same constraints). I hope we’ll be able to stick to a release early + release often habit anyway.
Looking forward to tell you more about it once we’ve started.
12/09/2009
New sympa (.org) t-shirt in my collection
5/09/2009
Triplification / RDF extraction for bugzillas and for Debian bugs
To summarize some ideas and try and promote the work we’ve done in the frame of Helios, we’ve submitted a short paper (PDF) to the triplification challenge.
Alas, others had better projects, and we didn’t win, apparently. Still, we’ll continue to work beyond these initial demonstrators, in order to try and push for a standard of interchange of “facts” / meta-data about bugs, for instance as RDF using the EvoOnt BOM ontology plus our extensions.
The paper describes the 2 first demonstrators that we’ve setup (and for which I previously blogged) : one for the triplification of bugzilla, and one for the triplification about Debian bugs, using UDD to do so.
Abstract: To interconnect bugtrackers, and especially the one used to manage free
software projects, one need tools to convert their custom format to a common interop-
erable form. We, in the context of the Helios project, are working on refining existing
ontologies to describe bugs from the most used bugtrackers in open source software. We
propose two prototypes for review, based on triplify and EvoOnt BOM, which export
bugs from bugzilla installations and Debian’s UDD in the form of RDF triples.
Read the rest in “Bugtrackers triplification” (PDF)
2/09/2009
Hello Planet Debian
Hi all Debian news addicts. If all goes well, I should now be part of the Debian planet, thanks to the good Planet Maintainers.
In a few words, I’m a Debian Maintainer, and long time Debian fan (although sometimes disappointed by it, but love hate relationship is sustainable in the long run, it seems ).
My most significant contributions have been on helping maintain bts-link… and generally I’m interested very much in bugtracking, Semantic Web, and tying that with what’s done in Debian and more generally in Free Software. I’m focusing on these aspects as part of our Helios project funded to work on producing FLOSS 
My debian tag’s feed will tell more about me and my progress in contributing to Debian, from now on.
