Exploiting Semantic Web for Open Source Software Development: Opportunities and Challenges (Invited Paper)

Open source software development inherently demands an equitable environment which is independent of geo-graphical and cultural boundaries so that people are free to exercise their maximum potential in product life cycle. Over the last decade Open Source initiatives have achieved a lot in terms of knowledge sharing, software reuse, soft-ware improvement, and return on investment. However, the same pace may not be guaranteed in future because of nat-ural limitations caused due to heterogeneous societies, lin-guitic & cultural variations, and the differences in technical awareness. Rather the issues are bound to multiply looking at the drastic increase in multiple data sources and media types, huge amount of published information and software on the web. The solution to this problem is explicit descrip-tion of concepts and tacit knowledge in a machine under-standable way so that the termonoligical differences are re-solved by machines. Semantic Web technology has the right potential to address these issues. Some recent prototypes have shown promising results for solving these problems. One such case is SemanticLIFE open source application for managing the person’s lifetime information. 1