OSSRank is a project for ranking and categorizing open source projects - very meta.
There are millions of open-source software projects and libraries available on the internet and many more get added every day. As a prospective user of open source software, you probably find yourself going through a process something like this:
- Search for candidate projects you could use to solve a particular problem
- Evaluate various projects that meet your search criteria
- Visit each of their project sites and source code repositories to try to determine things like maturity of the project, size and activity level of the community, responsiveness to issues
- Look around on Stack Overflow, Twitter and various discussion forums to see what people are saying about it
OSSRank attempts to automate this whole process by:
- Discovering open-source projects by collecting their metadata from GitHub
- Classifying them into a growing list of specified categories
- Collecting data about them from Stack Exchange & finding their social footprint on Twitter
- Continuously evaluating them and tracking their growth over a timeline
- Ultimately ranking each project within its categories
Project metadata is collected from GitHub and stored in a NoSQL database currently MongoDB. Each project's metadata is periodically augmented with related data from Twitter and Stack Overflow.
Project descriptions are analyzed and compared against a text corpus to automatically place projects into one or more categories
Project metadata from these sources is analyzed to assign a rank based on criteria such as number of commits, size of community, number of questions asked and answered.
The results of this analysis is used to provide an interactive searchable UI at http://ossrank.appspot.com which includes visualizations to help OSS users to evaluate projects suitable for their use.
In the future we plan to do much more adding sentiment analysis of the feeds in twitter, and add security analysis as part of our evaluation.
If you want to help improve OSSRank directly we have a fairly detailed CONTRIBUTING guide in the repository that you can use to understand how code gets in to the system, how the project runs, and how to make changes yourself.
If you find any issues, feel free to report them in the issues section of this repository.
