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