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ITerating Weaves a Semantic Web


Semantic technologies make it possible to automatically exchange software information

By David Worthington
August 28, 2007 — 
There are more than 100,000 open source projects hosted on SourceForge.net, and SourceForge is not a world onto itself: Web sites describe, link to and review software hosted in its repository. In that vein, how can information about those projects be kept accurate and up to date?

Dedicated individuals could spend countless hours carefully categorizing software and paging through change logs, describing software their own way for their own organization; islands of information about software can already be found across the Web.

ITerating, a startup that hosts a wiki-based software guide, thinks it has a better solution born out of so-called “Semantic Web” technologies. On Aug. 27, ITerating launched a free Semantic Web service that shares data about software with other Web sites, using standardized vocabularies.

The Semantic Web was first introduced in a 2001 Scientific American article written by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, who argued that Web content that is meaningful to computers will “unleash a revolution of new possibilities.”

The ITerating Web service exchanges information about software using machine-read RDF metadata feeds. The service is built upon four Semantic Web ontologies: DOAP (Description of a Project), FOAF (Friend of a Friend), Open BRR (Business Readiness Rating) and Review, an ontology created by Semantic Web developer and technical author Danny Ayers to express software reviews in a vocabulary machines can parse.

ITerating’s ontology framework provides a common language for comparing, discovering and sharing information about software products, said Nicolas Vandenberghe, ITerating’s founder and CEO.

ITerating.com, which was developed using Hewlett-Packard’s Jena Semantic Web Toolkit, lists descriptions and reviews for more than 18,000 commercial, open source and hosted applications. Its software repository was populated en masse with Open BRR data. Open BRR is a model proposed as a standard to rate open source software. It is being sponsored by the Center for Open Source Investigation at Carnegie Mellon West, Intel, O'Reilly CodeZoo and SpikeSource.

Another advantage of Open BRR is that it enables software to be compared and sorted by a feature matrix.

Vandenberghe said that ITerating is working to goad the industry into adopting the BRR vocabulary and commercial vendors into sending information about software in a standard way.

The W3C has established a Health Care and Life Sciences group concentrating on building Semantic Web solutions. Currently, more than 120 Semantic Web tools are listed on W3C’s Web site in addition to nine software use cases.


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