Upstream Metadata
Introduction
I am starting an experimental effort to collect meta-information about upstream in a file called debian/upstream-metadata.yaml in the source packages maintained by the DebianMed project. Since these source packages are stored in a subversion repository on Alioth, the information can be updated without uploading the source packages to the Debian archive.
A draft collector system is being implemented on upstream-metadata.debian.net. The plan is to use it to prepare tables that can be fed to the UltimateDebianDatabase.
The first proof of principle that I would like to establish is to make the DebianMed web sentinels (‘http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks’) use the UDD, fed from the debian/upstream-metadata.yaml via upstream-metadata.debian.net, to display bibliographic information about which academic article to cite when using our packages. This is currently done by collecting the information in the central file used to create the med-* metapackages.
Fields
In alphabetic order. Let's try to use the same vocabulary as in DOAP as much as possible.
- Archive
- When the upstream work is part of a large archive, like CPAN.
- Contact
- Which person, mailing list, forum,… to send messages in the first place.
- DOI
- This is the digital object identifier of the academic publication describing the packaged work.
- Name
- Upstream name of the packaged work.
- Homepage
- The packaged work's homepage.
- PMID
Same as the DOI, but with the ID number in the PubMed database.
- Reference
The following fields are used to document the academic publication describing the packaged work, and are usually pasted from ?BibTex references. There is a big issue to solve: what if the Debian package contains more than one work, published in different articles.? Also, some fields that can be used independantly, the DOI and the PubMed ID, have a shorter name that does not start by Reference-.
- Reference-Author
- Author list.
- Reference-Journal
- Abbreviated journal name.
- Reference-Number
- Issue number.
- Reference-Pages
- Article page number(s).
- Reference-Title
- Article title.
- Reference-URL
- Hyperlink to the electronic version of the article.
- Reference-Volume
- Journal volume.
- Reference-Year
- Year of publication
- References
- An URL to a upstream page containing more references. Repository: URL to a repository containing the upstream sources.
Screenshots: URL to an upstream page containing screenshots (not screenshots.debian.org.
- Watch
Currently it contains the main line of debian/watch. It is therefore assumed to be in format version 3. For surveying multiple locations, it could contain a YAML sequence.
Discussion
Let's discuss here, on a mailing list (debian-med or debian-qa), or a discussion page, if available.
The data is not really Debian-specific, lets put it outside Debian and use the ?PackageMap to map between Debian package names and the data:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2009/11/msg00450.html