Experimentation of a socially constructed “Topic Map” by the OSS community

We present, in this article, a “topic map” system applied to the Open Source Software (OSS) community. Our approach is deliberately open and based on the HyperTopic model created by TechCICO 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 community members can describe and find software applications, 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 community will build, in an ideal case, collective semantics “in progress”. We present this project as an example of a “SocioSemantic Web” (S2W). We also detail the HyperTopic model, on which is based our application, and the AGORAE platform which brings this software 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 representation 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.