“The ability to exchange software product information in a free, standard format is a tremendously valuable asset for the software community,” said Larry Augustin, venture investor, open source evangelist and founder of sourceforge.net. “We look forward to seeing more companies endorse it.”

ITerating, provider of a free Wiki-based software guide for open source, commercial and hosted software, has announced the availability of a free Semantic Web service providing up-to-date information about more than 17,000 software products at www.iterating.com. Other repositories of product information can now automatically synchronize their data with this ITerating Web service. IT professionals and other consumers of software can use the service to keep up-to-date on information about new products, new versions, and patch distributions for commercial, open source, and hosted software.

It has become a daunting task for IT professionals and consumers of software information to keep up-to-date due to the vast number of new versions, drivers, and patches that are now available, and the condensed time frame in which all are developed. Now users can subscribe to specific products or product categories on ITerating.com and easily create an automated information feed. The ITerating Web service can now be synchronized with many repositories of software product information such as Linux distribution archives and online guides.

ITerating worked with the Semantic Web community to develop this unique Web service. The service is built upon a Semantic ontology framework that consists of four ontologies: DOAP (Description Of A Project), FOAF (Friend Of A Friend), Open BRR (Business Readiness Rating™), and Review. ITerating created a Semantic ontology for Open BRR, which is a standard model for rating open source software. In addition, ITerating worked with the creators of DOAP and Review to extend their existing ontologies. Finally, these three ontologies were combined with the FOAF ontology – resulting in a comprehensive vocabulary structure for discovering, sharing and comparing up-to-date information about open source, commercial and hosted software products.

“Our goal is to offer the world’s first comprehensive software guide that is always up-to-date,” said Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO of ITerating. “By combining a Wiki format with Semantic Web services, we are able to ensure that the information on the ITerating site is both comprehensive and up-to-date. Now everyone has the opportunity to use this powerful but simple tool to organize, share and combine information about software on the Web.

• ITerating Offers Comprehensive Wiki-Based Software Guide