Hello Edd (DOAP project owner),

The SPDX (http://spdx.org) working group is involved in defining a
standard format for communicating the components, licenses and copyrights
associated with a software package. A number of our members including
myself are very familiar with RDF and DOAP. For the same reasons you picked
RDF XML and leveraged FOAF, we likewise picked RDF XML and realize our
vocabulary can reference DOAP. Currently, the SPDX effort is in the process
of translating the specification from wiki format into an OWL format. (Our
site does not yet reflect very well our choice of RDF XML as the machine
readable format...)

SPDX is focused on a deep analysis (on a per file level) of the licenses
used within an spdx:Package. As such SPDX is a specialist community and
actually does have the desire to own identifiers for licenses, and create
RDF descriptions of the licenses. (You stated this is out of scope of DOAP
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-osproj3/)

An spdx:Package is really any tarball of analyzed source code. Although
there is some (considerable?) overlap between concepts in SPDX and DOAP, we
believe the focus of SPDX is sufficiently narrow that it makes sense to keep
it separate from DOAP (i.e. not suggest we introduce new concepts into
DOAP). Rather, reference DOAP as appropriate.

For example, in some cases, an spdx:Package is equivalent to a
http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#file-release

And in some cases, perhaps one might assert that
spdx:File spdx:origin doap:Project

(e.g. a specific file foo.java came from
http://usefulinc.com/software/gnome-bluetooth )

Also, we're experimenting with collaborating on the development of our
ontology using a free online tool knoodl.com (Note: we have no affiliation
with knoodl.com)
In order to facilitate developing our ontology to reference DOAP, it may
be useful to have the DOAP ontology loaded onto knoodl. I took the liberty
of uploading doap.rdf into knoodl.com being sure to reference you and your
site; it lives at
http://knoodl.com/ui/groups/DOAP/vocab/DOAP(trunk,19)

We would welcome you to join the SPDX group (self register for the mailing
list at spdx.org). We would value your advice and collaboration.

Thanks,
Bill


Bill Schineller
Knowledge Base Manager
Black Duck Software Inc.
T: +1.781.810.1829
F: +1.781.891.5145
E: bschineller@...
http://www.blackducksoftware.com