MARKOS · The MARKet for Open Source\nAn Intelligent Virtual Open Source Marketplace

MARKOS will realize the prototype of a service and an interactive application providing an integrated view on the Open Source projects available the on web, focusing on functional, structural and licenses aspects of software code.While other services, such as Ohloh.com, mainly focuses on people and activities or on text search into the source code, MARKOS will offer semantic search and browsing to navigate the structure of the software code at a high level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the understanding of the software from a technical point of view.Moreover the MARKOS system will focus on the software integration aspects. In particular it will show and exploit the relationships between software components released by different projects, giving an integrated view of the available Open Source software at a global scale.MARKOS will exploit components relationships also for allowing a more efficient and accurate analysis of licence compatibility and to provide well founded legal argumentations.The integrated view on Open Source software will be made available both as front-end application, for human consumption, and published as Linked Data for tool consumption, allowing the linking with other initiative adopting the Linked Data approach.In order to facilitate the collaboration between different projects, MARKOS will provide tools to manage upstream/downstream ticketing (i.e. allow to send and receive notification of changes to an artefact of a project that might affect an artefact of other related projects).We will evaluate the MARKOS system in workshops involving selected separate groups of end users with different background, either technical or business/legal, in scenarios coming from industrial and Open Source communities'. The MARKOS system itself will be released as open source software. Thanks to the offered functionalities MARKOS is expected to facilitate software development based on the Open Source paradigm in a global context.