Hi. I'm not subscribed to ftpmasters, so feel free to CC me in response, and I hope d-d@l.d.o is the proper place it will be debated, then (even thouh -project already holds some bits too).
Le vendredi 14 octobre 2011 à 19:08 +0200, Matthias Klumpp a écrit : > AppStream features XML to store metadata. Because we don't use XML > somewhere in Debian, DEP-11 features a well-known RFC822-style format. May I suggest to implement some (standardized) variant of RDF [0] to represent this meta-data ? I think it would help here, to adopt standards for more interoperability of Debian's metadata with others'. The "package metadata" could even be delivered on the Web of Data (Linked Open Data), right from the Debian servers, to allow any application to be created, that would consume such metadata. If RDF/XML (as seems to be proposed by SPDX, to be verified once the Linux Foundation site is back) is not suitable, then another format would be great as long as it relies on some explicit prefix+suffix combination, in order to allow for extensibility, for instance some JSON variant of RDF like Turtle [1]. If a package can both be described with some generic purpose "ontology"/standard/schema (for instance the one you envisioned initially in DEP 11), and also, depending on context (embedded or science, for instance) with another set of metadata (spdx or whatever else), you'd be able to mix in the same file, metadata relating to different contexts. Still, I'm not sure RFC822-style is perfectly compliant with the habit of RDF to separate prefix and suffix with a column character ':'. Maybe '_' could act as such a separator (must say I haven't checked the RFC for allowed tokens in the grammar) ? Let's try with an example (btw, the DEP http://wiki.debian.org/AppStreamDebianProposal *lacks* examples IMHO) : In turtle representation format for RDF, one would have a document that looks like this : @prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>. @prefix dep11: <http://www.debian.org/whatever/dep11#>. @prefix debbugs: <http://www.debian.org/whatever/depxx#>. @prefix spdx: <http://spdx.org/ontology#>. <http://packages.qa.debian.org/iceweasel> a dep11:DebianPackage; dep11:application "Iceweasel"; dep11:package "iceweasel"; spdx:license "MPL-1.1" debbugs:bugs <http://bugs.debian.org/iceweasel>. (Maybe I didn't understand very well the Application and Package meanings in your DEP11 proposal, btw.) Anyway, as you can see, here we could have several "domains" of metadata sources (ontologies / prefixes) to describe the same package combined in a single document. In RFC822-style, this could be something like : DEP11_Application: Iceweasel DEP11_Package: iceweasel spdx_license: MPL-1.1 debbugs_bugs: http://bugs.debian.org/iceweasel etc. But clearly, not reinventing the wheel should be a goal, and adopting existing standards for meta-data representation would be my choice, i.e. Semantic Web standards (namely RDF). Of course, translators from/to different syntaxes will be trivial to develop, but if, from the source, a proper standard is used, it can be readily delivered to the Web without any transformation needed. Such an approach (often called Linked Data), clearly favors interoperability (more at http://linkeddata.org/guides-and-tutorials if I failed to make my point). Again, in case you'd doubt it, RDF is just a model, which can be written in a number of different formats (not only XML), but the key here is the embedded identification of the reference of the ontologies/prefixes which render the documents self described and extensible, out of the box. Note that the same rationale stands for all metadata to be eventually published on the Web by Debian servers. Hope this helps. Best regards, [0] http://www.w3.org/RDF/ [1] http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/turtle/ -- Olivier BERGER <olivier.ber...@it-sudparis.eu> http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8 Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF Institut TELECOM, SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry (France) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1318865495.3675.36.ca...@inf-8657.int-evry.fr
