[Introspector-developers] Updated webpage and description of the project

[James M. D. <mdu...@ya...>]

I have updated the main webpage, 
please review the text and comment on it.
mike
ABSTRACT

The Introspector enables the programming tools that deal with source
code such as the compiler to communicate in a standard and neutral
manner reducing the accidental cost of programming. Like a telephone
switchboard connects many parties who might wish to talk to each other,
the Introspector allows multiple consumers and producers of data about
software to be quickly and painlessly transfered. This data about
software, or meta-data is read and written in and out of existing
software tools via a standardized plug-in interface. Each producer has
its own flavour of data and format of data that it stores about your
software, and the introspector allows for each software to speak it's
native language. The Introspector plug ins act analogous to network
cards in an ethernet allowing for broadcasting of the meta-data to the
network of consumers.
Get Involved

Please vising the project page for Downloads

Please join the Mailing List for discussion

Please come to the irc server irc://irc.freenode.net/#introspector for
a chat
Implementation

The usage of RDF or Resources Description Format as the underlying
representation is of essential importance. RDF is the foundation of the
next generation of the internet, the Semantic Web where hypertext links
is replaced by meaningful references to resources of type and quality.
The introspector uses the excellent Redland RDF Application Framework
for parsing/serializing, storing/retrieving and querying/traversing the
RDF data. The Berkley DB storage mechanism provides an efficent
indexing system, and the SWIG Simplified Wrapper Interface Generator
provides native langauge interfaces for all major programming systems.
The GCC interface uses Redland to create repositories of data that can
be processed by any tool needed. Experiments have been made with
compiling this graph data into arrays, so called "ICE Cubes" that can
be traversed even quicker than the redland database. This new
technology when available will be able to be used from the same
introspector API that gives access to Redland.
Future Goals

The internal data structures of the compiler are translated into OWL
Web Ontology Language structures that describe the structure of
compilers meta-data about your programs. Futher the processing and
parsing of this meta-data will is driven by meta-programs that are
written a special form RDF that gives instructions to the introspector
engine how to effienctly traverse and extract relevant data similar to
XSLT and GraphPath. This frees the introspector from containing any
knowledge about copyrighted material. Currently this is being protyped
in perl instead of creating a new language. The introspector seeks to
populate the semantic web with data about software and most importantly
about free software because the sources are publically available. This
first layer of meta-data describing the resource of free software will
be the key for making intelligent programs (agents) that are able to
reason about the software itself. Examples of such agents are tools
that can find relevant emails for lines of sources code because having
a detailed and documented semantic model of the domain of free software
is the key for the processing of the natural language texts about it.

This meta-data is to include all data collected about your software by
the compiler, the make & build system, the savannah/sourceforge project
management and debian packaging system, the CVS changes and the mailman
mailing list software.

The Introspector's scope was originally just the GCC "C" compiler, but
is now expanded to include the extraction of  meta-data from different
compilers and interpreters, such as
perl,bison,m4,bash,c#,java.c++,fortran,objective-c,lisp and scheme.
Various patches to the target systems will be officialy submitted and
unofficially maintained to allow for the introspector to extract data
in a standard form.
License

The software is free software in the spirit of the GNU manifesto and is
revolutionary in the freedoms that it intends on granting to its users.
It is designed to be independant of the sources and consumers of the
metadata that it provides and to avoid creating dependancies on any one
provider. The focus of the introspector is enabling the user of the
compiler and tool builders to be able to access the data they need.
Licensing is GPL for the core with LGPL for the user facing modules.
The licensing of the ontologies and tree traversing tools that may or
may not be derived from the source code of the producers of the
metadata is an open question. 

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/