Recently Ross wrote an excellent document on DOAP http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/doap.xml and it got me thinking about what other kinds of things people are likely to be doing with DOAP and what best-practises there were out there that we could copy.
DOAP (Description Of A Project) http://usefulinc.com/doap/ is a vocabulary for describing projects (particularly open source projects) using RDF (Resource Description Framework) http://www.w3.org/RDF/. Essentially it is a set of objects to be used in RDF logical triples, allowing websites, mailing lists, bug tracking databases and similar to be specified. DOAP can be freely mixed with other vocabularies, such as FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) is a set of objects and verbs to describe people and their connections.
There are a couple of interesting DOAP files with novel features (or novel to me, anyway). Common characteristics of these files are that they're generated by RDF aware people (first language speakers of RDF/DOAP if you like) and that they're hand crafted by members of the project (who're in a position to know a maximal amount about the project).
DOAP for Redland: http://librdf.org/redland.rdf Nice use of <category />, multiple different sites and obfuscated email
DOAP over Atom example from CodeZoo http://www.codezoo.com/about/doap_over_atom.csp Nice use of mimetypes and languages to separate content for humans and computers,
DOAP in a FOAF file http://www.sauria.com/~twl/foaf.rdf Repurposable fragments of DOAP are likely to go down well in the broader RDF / FOAF community
One problem with having a single DOAP file for an open source project, is that it assumes that a single entity (i.e. the entity that generated the DOAP file) knows everything that is useful to know about the project. One way of overcoming this problem is by linking to a surrogate elsewhere that other entities can add information too. A candidate for this is an RDF-aware wiki such as http://ontoworld.org/
SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) http://sioc-project.org/ seems like an obvious place to start looking at describing a community in RDF it focuses on describing blogs, wikis, mailing lists and forums. DOAP specifies tags such as <Repository>, <mailing-list>, <wiki>, <bug-database> and <screenshots> which point to content structured in ways could be described using <sioc:Post>s.
