From freedesktop-xdg Wed Aug 11 18:50:14 2004 From: Claes Holmerson Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:50:14 +0000 To: freedesktop-xdg Subject: DOAP, Description of a project Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=freedesktop-xdg&m=117278151608112 I recently discovered an interesting project I thought I should bring to your attention: DOAP, "Description of a project". http://usefulinc.com/doap/ The goal of DOAP is to develop a metadata format to describe open source projects. It seems to aim especially to act as definitive source format for various software directories such as Freshmeat, but I think it can be valuable also for the desktop. Why is this interesting? I think because there is lack of good metadata for free desktops today. The .desktop files include very sparse human readable information, and the descriptions in there must also come from somewhere. Some programs have good documentation, but the coupling between executable, documentation, man page, home page, repository, .desktop file etc is loose. I previously did some research to see what kind of metadata was available to describe the programs I had installed on my Linux system. Actually, it is not so much. .desktop files, but with very sparse human readable descriptions. Descriptions from the package management system. Also there data is available in directories such as Freshmeat, but this is not easy retrievable, and not quite free. If something like DOAP is widely adopted I imagine every source tarball would include a DOAP description in it. This could be useful when creating .desktop files. Also, If DOAP files were installed as part of the installation I imagine it would be easier to create user interfaces for searching software on a system since there would be richer human readable texts to index and search for. I realize that a description of a project is not the same thing as a description of the software that is produced by the project. Do you have any innovative ideas of how DOAP (or similar) files could be used on a free desktop? What metadata would be good if it could be included in a DOAP file, from the desktop point of view? I think DOAP looks promising, especially after having read the design documents, linked from its home page. Claes