Experimentation of a socially constructed “Topic Map” by the OSS community
Résumé
We present, in this article, a “topic map” system applied to the Open Source Software (OSS) com-munity. Our approach is deliberately open and based on the HyperTopic model created by Tech-CICO lab. Our collective experimentation aims at the construction of a shared information platform that would be visible and useable for the OSS community. Thanks to this platform, OSS commu-nity members can describe and find software appli-cations, by browsing multi-point of view “topic maps”. Everyone may declare the characteristics of a software project following an index structure made of several tree diagrams. Thus, the commu-nity will build, in an ideal case, collective seman-tics “in progress”. We present this project as an example of a “Socio-Semantic Web” (S2W). We also detail the Hyper-Topic model, on which is based our application, and the AGORAE platform which brings this soft-ware application into play. The HyperTopic model is inspired by the simple semantic models of “topic maps”, but it enriches this approach by two new dimensions. First, it aims at improving the repre-sentation of shared meaning artifacts (in this case: software applications), of the social actors and of their activities. Second, this HyperTopic model is a support for debating the meaning of these representations