Hello. I've just joined this discussion list and will introduce myself/our project briefly.
We're really interested in participating to interoperability and standardization efforts in the area of bugtracker tools, so your initiative looks really appealing. For the records, I've just discovered this initiative through a common commenting, together with Steve Speicher, on a bugzilla enhancement request, very recently... and without prior hints that such a group was working on similar subject as ours, although we've been working on bugtracker interoperability for a little bit more than a year now (probably in parallel universes ;-). We're working, in the frame of the Helios project (about Open source tools for ALM) on a work-package dedicated to bugtracker interoperability, whose description is available here : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/ (also TWiki based ;). Among common interest with the current efforts in the OSLC CM group, I've spotted the definition of a model/ontology/interchange format to represent bug facts that we've also been working on. The current state of our work is documented in https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Helios_wp3/Web/HeliosBtOntology (Actually, we've been in contact with other players working on a bug representation interchange standard in the "baetle" project (http://code.google.com/p/baetle/) and I'm a bit suprised we haven't been in contact before through that other initivative. Anyway...) Maybe you'd be interested in our contributions on bug modeling, for instance if our model and yours are complementary ? Something we've been studying (not yet properly documented, though) is the modeling of links between (related) bugs filed in different bugtrackers, like for instance along the distribution process, between "upstream" projects' bugtrackers and GNU/Linux distributions bugtrackers. I don't know if this has been adressed yet in your efforts (having had too little time to read the wiki in details). We're working at the moment on trying to map Open Source bugtrackers bug models to this ontology (starting with Debian and Mandriva bugs) in order to build new applications (which will be announced in the following weeks). In the future we hope that there will be a common standard that could be supported by most Open Source bugtrackers in the future, in order to facilitate the QA process of Open Source maintainers, so as to avoid potential duplication of (volunteer based) effort in such maintenance (every packagers in every OSS distros are doing more or less the same tasks in separate platforms at the moment). Also one of the "side-effects" goals of our efforts is to facilitate the "participation" of (public) bugs filed on open source projects to the Semantic Web with the Linked Data approach. To give you bits about where I'm talking from, Helios is an industry + academia joint R&D project funded as part of french R&D clusters, and we're an academic institution (Institut TELECOM) in France, leading this WP. We've had, in our team at Institut TELECOM, a past record of interest in many Open Source related matters, around process, software engineering, collaboration, communities and software forges. I'm not sure this introduction will be appealing to some of you, but we would gladly welcome some comments on our results (the bug ontology mentioned above mainly). I hope we can identify interesting collaboration occasions in the future on Change Management and other bugtracker matters. Best regards, -- Olivier BERGER <[email protected]> http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France)
