

GitReview – IMDB for software - colinhowe
http://gitreview.com/

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0x006A
Picking up on the IMDb reference. IMDb is a database of movie metadata for all
movies. important points are:

a) they provide a unique id for each movie

b) movie metadata does not exist digitally otherwise, thus imdb managed to
become _the_ place for metadata about movies.

c) movies have a well defined set of metadata values they all share

now what does that mean for software?

a) gitreview currently uses the name of a software package as id but that is
not unique. even less unique than title/year for movies. I recommend to switch
to numbers right away. I.e. if
[http://gitreview.com/packages/nginx/](http://gitreview.com/packages/nginx/)
is not nginx([http://nginx.org/](http://nginx.org/)) nothing should be.

b) there are many online repositories of software with various levels of
metadata. and the software itself is also available online from the authors
most of the time. what does gitreview add to make it _the_ place for metadata
about software?

c) there is no well defined or commonly agreed metadata set for software, what
information is gitreview collecting exactly? currently i see name,
description, link and some tags. Why are you not using something like
DOAP([https://github.com/edumbill/doap/wiki](https://github.com/edumbill/doap/wiki))?

~~~
jamie-w
The site isn't necessarily about the meta data - that information is provided
in multiple places around the web. It's more about the gathering of
information and links in one place and sharing feedback on usage experience
amongst developers.

Regarding the names and urls - you have a valid point, they should more
clearly indicate the library they are referencing.

