Project Directory

The idea: Put the Software Registry into Freebase

You're probably familiar with the community software registry page on the this wiki. This page has evolved through a number of incarnations over the years and has always suffered from the problem of falling out of date. It also suffers from the fact that is is becoming too big and covering too broad of a range of software. In order to address this, we want to try putting all of this software into Freebase, where anyone can list their own software along with whatever information they deem fit. We can then replace the Software Registry wiki page with an app that dynamically loads the desired listing of software from freebase. Getting your software listed will then be as simple as creating an entry for it in Freebase and asserting that it participates in the Fedora Commons space.

Are you willing to give this a go by putting entries into Freebase for your Fedora-related software?

Sample/Prototype Freebase App

For instructions on how to post your software, visit Adding your software to Freebase

We've created an initial version of the app using Acre: http://www.freebase.com/apps/app/user/flyingzumwalt/fedoraregistry

(Trying to embed the app into this wiki page. If anyone has ideas, please give it a try!)

How the app currently works

Everything about this app is up for scrutiny, improvement, discussion and/or replacement. I just wanted to have a proof of concept to get us started. You can see the source code, including the MQL search that the app is running against freebase, here: http://acre.freebase.com/#app=/user/flyingzumwalt/fedoraregistry&file=index

Ultimately, the goal is to make it as easy as possible to add your software to Freebase and have complete information about it show up in the app. At the same time, we don't want to go inventing a special magical Fedora Commons Community Software ontology because that would defeat half of the utility of using Freebase.

Currently, ActiveFedora is the only software that shows up because I'm using a custom relationship "Fedora Repository" to find the applicable software. I couldn't decide what existing relationship in the existing ontologies in freebase would be appropriate for finding only stuff that fits in the Fedora Commons domain.

The "Category" column is empty right now. Ideally, it should be one of the Project Categories from the Fedora Create community page, but I couldn't decide what Schema these categories should subscribe to.

Get Involved

If you're interested in this, or related efforts, please join the Fedora Create mailing list and chime in.

Adding your software to Freebase