This is just one of the components of the Hackystat framework. It needs the help of other services to be executed, and it's been renamed as Hackystat LinkedServiceData (its acronym is LiSeD) because, during development other Hackystat services have begun to necessary other than just the SensorBase.

The Hackystat LiSeD service is meant to "link" resources useful for developers during SW development (such as other Developers' profiles, SW Projects, and SW Issues) with external resources that share something in common with them. This is an Architectural Overview:

The only data stored are the ones in the Front-side cache and the list of Hackystat Network servers; they're serialized into files. LiSeD interacts with other two Hackystat services which are SensorBase and Telemetry, in order to create Developers, SW Projects, and SW Issues's profiles, while interacts with the orange rectangles of the WWW to search for resources that can be usefully linked with the local ones. The linkage of these resources follows the Linked Data principles, which are:

1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs
3. Provide useful information in RDF when someone looks up a URI
4. Include RDF links to other URIs

and you can request a representation of them following the REST API in any of the currently existing RDF serialization language (that is N3, N-triple, RDF/XML, RDF/XML-abbrev, Turtle). Searches over these resources are also provided through Sparql endpoints, which accept only SELECT queries and return results in the SPARQL Query Results XML Format, as recommended by W3C. Searches are propagated over the Hackystat Network which is a group of Hackystat LiSeD servers that agreed to be linked with your own LiSeD.

Why should you be interested in the Hackystat LiSeD service?

• You're local resources won't be divided from the rest of the world anymore. They will be linked with external similar resources, forming a network comprehending either the Hackystat Network and resources on the Web (represented by those orange rectangles in the architectural overview).

How could you take advantage of this network?

• Being part of this network means that you're able to:
• given a project of interest,
• visualize links to projects (within the network) that use the same tools or focusing on the same topic (category) as yours. Then you know where you could find help with some annoying tools, or tips to realize some tasks common to all the projects belonging to the same category as yours;
• search your network for projects with any sort of features. Between others, there's the chance to specify some project-quality-measure values to filter search results. In this way if you're interested in a particular category of projects which must adhere to some sort of quality threshold, then you can do search and find them all!
• given a user profile of interest,
• visualize a user profile with values about the quality of his developing work throughout his projects for the last year, and about the his communication effort, taking advantage of IRC-logs (the 'activity' tracked by Google into user's accounts is going to be considered in the next future);
• visualize links to external profiles/artifacts/websites about the same user (these external profiles are found with different grades of certainty; see the "Design and Development page" for details);
• search for users having specific skills, knowing specific tools or languages, obtaining specific developing-quality-measure values, to get help on something, suggestions or simply meet together;
• given an issue of interest,
• visualize links to issues tagged with the same tags of yours or marked as duplicates automatically (because collected from the same resource) or manually by users themselves. You can find useful tips to solve your own issue by taking a look to how others have solved or are solving similar ones;
• search for issues specifying any kind of feature you want.

• This is all possible thanks to the magical potential of Linked Data. In fact Software Projects, Developers and Issues resource and lists of them, are all described as Linked Data. They're provided by LiSeD in any RDF serialization language (RDF/XML, RDF/XML-abbrev, N3, N-triple, Turtle) you might prefer.

• Didn't you convinced that really everything can link and be linked with each other? The "Web of Data Discovery" is a well-known issue but is going to be overcome while actually now, thanks to proper dataset descriptions that facilitate the work of semantic search engines. If a dataset is properly described following W3C recommendations, voID vocabulary description and some enormous and well-accepted ontology to specify your dataset content (such as Umbel), then can be easily crawled by semantic search engines and then linked properly and usefully by other datasets. Of course the Hackystat dataset has a voID description in which Umbel concepts are used, provided by the LiSeD service at {host}/vocab/void .

If these scenarios are not enough you can find also the ones included in the original proposal and other ones listed at the Vision page.

Are you curious to see all these functionalities in action?

If you're registered with the publicly available Hackystat SensorBase then take a look at the publicly running LiSeD service! You can send requests to it as specified in the Rest Api Specification, or you can run locally a graphical user interface to interact with it:

Otherwise run it locally: it's as simple as double-clicking a file (or executing a jar). See details on the Installation Guide.

Then use the Hackystat LiSeD service, and enjoy! See the User Guide if you need help.

Do you believe in this project, love its "Vision" and think it can be really improved?

If this is the case then help please! Ask the administer to contribute and you will be truly welcomed ;) There's a Developer Guide to introduce you with the current system. Moreover you would be interesting in other documentation artifacts such as the "Design and Development page" or the Hackystat schema.

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The project is part of Myriam Leggieri's M.Sc Dissertation in Collaborative Software Development at the University of Bari - Department of Computer Science.

Supporter Organizations:

Collaborative Development Group - University of Bari

Collaborative Software Development Laboratory - University of Hawaii

Google Summer of Code 2009