Supporting online problem-solving communities with the semantic web

Abstract

The Web plays a critical role in hosting Web communities, their content and interactions. A prime example is the open source software (OSS) community, whose members, including software developers and users, interact almost exclusively over the Web, constantly generating, sharing and refining content in the form of software code through active interaction over the Web on code design and bug resolution processes. The Semantic Web is an envisaged extension of the current Web, in which content is given a well-defined meaning, through the specification of metadata and ontologies, increasing the utility of the content and enabling information from heterogeneous sources to be integrated. We developed a prototype Semantic Web system for OSS communities, Dhruv. Dhruv provides an enhanced semantic interface to bug resolution messages and recommends related software objects and artifacts. Dhruv uses an integrated model of the OpenACS community, the software, and the Web interactions, which is semi-automatically populated from the existing artifacts of the community.