Hi. I've been working on ideas like interlinking descriptions of Free Software tools in different plateforms for some time, and hence, got interested in the AppStream efforts on a similar topic.
Has anyone worked on representing the metadata with RDF ? RDF [0] allows to define extensible representations, for instance for integrating a common standard (like AppData schema) and extensions (Distribution specific). I'm wondering if the Linked Data approach [1] could help interlinking public descriptions of applications, something that wouldn't need a server (in the sense of dedicated APIs), but just RDF descriptions hosted on the Web, pointing to each-other... I'm not sure how well this could fit in the current architecture and plans. One example of RDF meta-data about applications can be the work I've done to implement a RDF description for all source packages managed by the Debian PTS (Package Tracking System) [2], which is now in production. There are also quite many upstream projects describing their software/project with DOAP [4], so their descriptions could be used directly "from the source" to document applications. Tthinking in terms of RDF, I've tried and represent the example FireFox appdata.xml file [3] as Turtle [5]. It would go like this : ---- @prefix appdata: <http://freedesktop.org/ontology/appdata.rdf#>. @prefix mediatypes: <http://purl.org/NET/mediatypes#>. <> a appdata:Document ; appdata:version "0.1". <#applications> appdata:application <#firefox.desktop>; appdata:describedBy <>. <#firefox.desktop> a appdata:DesktopApplication ; appdata:pkgname "firefox-bin"; appdata:name "Firefox"; appdata:name "Firefoux"@en_GB; appdata:summary "Web browser"; appdata:summary "Navigateur web"@fr_FR; appdata:keyword "internet", "web", "browser", "navigateur"@fr_FR; appdata:icon [ a appdata:StockIcon ; appdata:name "web-browser" ]; appdata:appcategory "network", "web"; appdata:mimetype <mediatypes:text/html>, <mediatypes:text/xml>, <mediatypes:application/xhtml+xml>, <mediatypes:application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml>, <mediatypes:text/mml>, <mediatypes:application/x-xpinstall>, <mediatypes:x-scheme-handler/http>, <mediatypes:x-scheme-handler/https>; appdata:homepageUrl <http://www.mozilla.com>. ---- Maybe this format is close enough to the Debian DEP11 format, while still being parseable by RDF aware clients for applications. An interesting question is how to relate such a description of FireFox with the one the Debian PTS produces at http://packages.qa.debian.org/i/iceweasel.rdf then ;) Any comments ? Hope this helps. Best regards, [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data [2] http://www-public.telecom-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/2012/08/29/debian-package-tracking-system-now-produces-rdf-description-of-source-packages/ [3] http://gitorious.org/appstream/resources/blobs/master/appdata.xml [4] https://github.com/edumbill/doap/wiki [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_%28syntax%29 -- Olivier BERGER http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8 Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France) _______________________________________________ Distributions mailing list Distributions@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions
