OFLOSSC, AN ONTOLOGY FOR SUPPORTING OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITIES
Isabelle Mirbel · 2009
Abstract: Open source development is a particular case of distributed software development having a volatile project structure, without clearly-defined organization, where activity coordination is mostly based on the use of Web technologies. The dynamic and free nature of this kind of project raises new challenges about knowledge sharing. In this context, we propose a semantic Web approach to enhance coordination and knowledge sharing inside this kind of community. The purpose of this paper is to present OFLOSSC, the ontology we propose as the backbone of our approach. It is dedicated to the annotation of the community members and resources to support knowledge management services. While building OFLOSSC, our aim was twofold. On one hand, we wanted to reuse the ontologies on open source provided in the literature. On the other hand, we adopted a community of practice point of view to acquire the pertinent concepts for annotating resources of the open source development community. This standpoint emphasizes the sharing dimensions in knowledge management services. 1