Project Metadata Matrix, June 2011

1. Alioth: Alioth shows some text on page for the tags, but I can't find an example of project that has actually set them. Despite being a gforge-based project, does not list "natural language" or translations for projects.

2. Assembla: project's internal URL is problematic as sometimes it uses a url like assembla.com/spaces/projname, but this doesn't work for some like nooku (featured project)

3. Bitbucket: Only user list is available through commit history (no project "teams" per se).

4. Codehaus: Calculated number of projects on CodeHaus by using the project directory to list projects alphabetically, then summing the counts (total 288). Codehaus does not have a project directory so it was somewhat difficult to survey a variety of projects. Artifacts are more prevalent than metadata.

5. FedoraHosted: only provides trac, so very difficult to find project-level metadata in unstructured text.

6. Github: only provides a README section as 'description' so difficult to parse out metadata from that.

7. Gitorious: Latest file release date not specified in obvious manner.

8. Gna: French Free Software Foundation site. Shows list of files to download but there is no obvious way to parse out the latest release date so I coded this as 'no'.

9. Google Code: Does have a project search and directory, but too large to use to calculate manually the number of hosted projects. Their "labels" = my "tags"; note that theirs are only added by the administrator.

10. Java.Net: Merged with Project Kenai.

11. JavaForge: project internal URLs can (but do not always) use a project id instead of project name. Projects can choose which items to make available. Here I have coded "yes" for any features that I saw in a consistent location on a subset of project pages, but these widgets (for example tracker details) are located on different screens for different projects. Project topic is called "category". Some projects have member count but not member list.

12. Launchpad: I coded their notion of a 'contributor' as a 'member'. Tags are only available for bugs.

13. Objectweb: Has a middleware focus.Despite being a gforge-based project, does not list "natural language" or translations for projects.

14. Origo: does not have a directory, so I used the "recent projects" featured on home page to check out what projects were hosted there. Topic is called "category" on their site.

15. OSOR.eu: Forge includes federated sites hosted elsewhere, but I did not include these in my project counts. Lists 0 or more natural languages per project; I coded this as "translations".

16. Sarovar: Sarovar is based in India. Lists 0 or more natural languages per project; I coded this as "translations".

17. Sharesource: has a "view rating" but not an "activity rating".

18. Sourceforge: Development status is only available for projects in the 'alpha' or 'beta' status via a small icon near the project name on it's main project summary page. There seems to be no apparent link to the member list from the project page, but there is a URL you can use to get to this list (https://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=119453). You must know the 'group_id' of the project to get this list. This is the only forge that had 'awards' or 'features' as metadata, so I removed the tag.

19. Tigris: Calculated number of projects from project directory (by categories). There may be duplicates if projects are listed in more than one category. Used 'category' to map to my code for 'topic'. Statistics are optional for each project ("project metrics").

20. Tuxfamily: Offers a large tag-set for describing projects, but not explicit categories.