The DOAP Plugin is used to generate compliant Description of a Project (DOAP) file from a POM. The main goal is to be able to provide DOAP files for Semantic Web systems that use them as primary input but that would also alleviate the burden of maintaining two sets of metadata.
Version 1.0 of this plugin is specifically tailored for use by projects at Apache, but this will change in subsequent versions as more people become interested in DOAP.
If you are not aware about RDF or Semantic Web concepts, refer you to the Links part to getting started.
General instructions on how to use the DOAP Plugin can be found on the usage page. Some more specific use cases are described in the examples given below. Last but not least, users occasionally contribute additional examples, tips or errata to the plugin's wiki page.
In case you still have questions regarding the plugin's usage, please have a look at the FAQ and feel free to contact the user mailing list. The posts to the mailing list are archived and could already contain the answer to your question as part of an older thread. Hence, it is also worth browsing/searching the mail archive.
If you feel like the plugin is missing a feature or has a defect, you can fill a feature request or bug report in our issue tracker. When creating a new issue, please provide a comprehensive description of your concern. Especially for fixing bugs it is crucial that the developers can reproduce your problem. For this reason, entire debug logs, POMs or most preferably little demo projects attached to the issue are very much appreciated. Of course, patches are welcome, too. Contributors can check out the project from our source repository and will find supplementary information in the guide to helping with Maven.