DOAP

DOAP -- Description of a Project -- is a metadata initiative aimed at describing the public resources associated with a software project, providing interoperability between software registry web sites and making life easy for project maintainers. This can be a good help for understanding and tracking those thousand odd Sourceforge projects.

According to Edd Dunhill this project will provide -

Internationalizable description of a software project and its associated resources, including participants and Web resources
Basic tools to enable the easy creation and consumption of such descriptions
Interoperability with other popular Web metadata projects (RSS, FOAF, Dublin Core)
The ability to extend the vocabulary for specialist purposes

Use cases for project descriptions include:

Easy importing of projects into software directories
Data exchange between software directories
Automatic configuration for resources such as shared CVS repositories or bug trackers
Assisting package maintainers who bundle software for distri

More details here. This one will be interesting to watch as more and more open source projects dot the landscape.