OpenSym News

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Kwan Hui Lim, Amitava Datta

We present a framework for (automatically) classifying the relative interest of Twitter users using information from Wikipedia. Our proposed framework first uses Wikipedia to automatically classify a user’s celebrity followings into various interest categories, followed by determining the relative interest of the user with a weighting compared to his/her other interests. Our preliminary evaluation on Twitter shows that this framework is able to correctly classify users’ interests and that these users frequently converse about topics that both reflect their (detected) interest and a related real-life event.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Florian Marienfeld; Ina Schieferdecker; Evanela Lapi; Nikolay Tcholtchev

A key challenge for open data portals is the aggregation of metadata from various data catalogs (on different administrative level or from different application fields) also knownas metadata harvesting.  This paper describes harvesting at the pilot of the German open government portal Gov-Data.de, which is scheduled to become the data portal forall German public administration levels. At the launch of the pilot portal in February 2013, eleven federal, state and local data catalogs where integrated and produced about 2,000 open data sets. In the meantime, the data sets were increased to over 3,100 data sets mainly due to improved harvesting capabilities of the portal. This paper discusses the central meta data schema and experiences with the different harvesting techniques that are in use at Gov-Data.de: CKAN-Harvest, CKAN-API, CSW-Harvest and JSON-Dump.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Andrew Lih

This tutorial session addresses issues of multimedia and video co-creation in a wiki environment, using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons as an example.

Did you know that while English Wikipedia has over 4 million articles, only 0.1% of them have video? In 2013, the Wiki Makes Video project was started by Andrew Lih to encourage more video content creation. It was designed to further the work of earlier projects such as Lights Camera Wiki and Kaltura’s open source collaborative video editor work that had been started before 2010, but has stalled in recent years.

We demonstrate the challenges and best practices for video creation within a collaborative community, and how this project has used the idea of “”video patterns”” as an analog to “”programming patterns”” that originally spurred the development of wikis in the 1990s.

Topics include:
– Measuring the quantity and quality of video in Wikipedia’s articles
– How better video can be generated by contributors through teaching visual literacy using video patterns
– Overview of open technical standards being employed in Wikimedia Commons, and how to use them
– Researching and transcoding content from existing video repositories (Internet Archive, Library of Congress, et al)
– What barriers to participation might be, and how to encourage more visual content

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Poorna Mysoor

A broad based adoption of Creative Commons licenses is bound to face challenges. Some of the challenges arise from the way copyright laws in different jurisdictions are designed. Other challenges arise from either the way Creative Commons licenses are structured or due to the underlying policy considerations of information society as a whole.  This paper discusses these challenges and suggests ways of dealing with them.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Taha Yasseri, Giovanni Quattrone, Afra Mashhadi

In the recent years wikis have become an attractive platform for social studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns. However, contributions made to Geo-wikis — wiki-based collaborative mapping projects — differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those who posses local knowledge about a specic area and therefore cross-platform studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two European capital cities. We categorise dierent type of temporal patterns and report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age. We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity patterns of Wikipedia.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Jens Lincke; Robert Hirschfeld

Self-supporting development environments like Smalltalk and Emacs can be used to evolve the environment itself from within very direct way. In Web-based software development environments users can collaborate in creating software without having to install the environment locally. Bringing these two together and making Web-based environments self-supportive is challenging, since users have to take care not to break the system, as they are not the only ones using it.

In our previous work, we showed how context-oriented programming (COP) can be used to develop such a system completely from within itself. COP allows for dynamically adapting the base system and scope the changes as needed.
Environments aimed at end-users usually provide a scripting level above the base system. In our system, the Lively Kernel, the core is developed using modules and classes, and users create active content by direct manipulating and scripting objects on top of it. By leveraging the scripting level for the development of tools themselves, we allow users to adapt their tools, without the need to learn and adapt to the concepts of the core level.

In this paper we show how the development tools in Lively are collaboratively evolved. The publishing of objects in a shared repository of parts creates a feeling of extreme open source, as tools can be directly inspected, adapted, and republished while they are being used.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Carsten Kolassa; Dirk Riehle; Michel Salim

A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution (“”commit””) that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. An author’s commit frequency describes how often that author commits. Knowing the distribution of all commit frequencies is a fundamental part of understanding software development processes. This paper presents a detailed quantitative analysis of commit frequencies in open-source software development. The analysis is based on a large sample of open source projects, and presents the overall distribution of commit frequencies. We analyze the data to show the differences between authors and projects by project size we also includes a comparison of successful and non successful projects and we derive an activity indicator from these analyses. By measuring a fundamental dimension of programming we help improve software development tools and our understanding of software development. We also validate that some fundamental assumptions about software development.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Beat Estermann

Since the advent of the World Wide Web, the cultural heritage sector has undergone a series of changes. In a pilot survey among memory institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) in Switzerland we have focused on two recent trends – open data and crowdsourcing – asking to what extent heritage institutions are ready to adopt open data policies and to embrace crowdsourcing strategies. The results suggest that so far, only very few institutions have adopted an open data policy. There are, however, signs that this may soon change: a majority of the surveyed institutions considers open data as important and believes that the opportunities prevail over the risks. Some obstacles, however, still need to be overcome, in particular the institutions’ reservations with regard to “free” licensing and their fear of losing control. With regard to crowdsourcing the data suggest that the adoption process will be slower than for open data. Although approximately 10% of the responding institutions seem already to experiment with crowdsourcing, there is no general breakthrough in sight, as a majority of respondents remain sceptical with regard to the benefits.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Shane Coughlan; Tetsuo Noda; Terutaka Tansho

Open source licenses provide everyone with the legal right to use, study, share, and improve the technology they cover from the perspective of copyright law. However, there are occasions when open source software packages or projects primarily governed by copyright licenses come into potential conflict with patent issues, or suffer from other governance concerns regarding third-party Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). From an economic perspective it is interesting how instead of undermining adoption, such challenges have led to an increase of collaborative governance solutions in open source, perhaps inspired by how such collaboration in development and business matters has provided benefit to stakeholders. In this paper, we explore the evolution of collaborative solutions in open source business by examining actual using real world examples, and in the process illustrate how this unique approach to dealing with diverse ownership across business sectors works in practice.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Sulayman K. Sowe; Koji Zettsu

Wiki technologies have proven to be versatile and successful in aiding collaborative authoring of web content. Multitude of users can collaboratively add, edit, and revise wiki pages on the fly, with ease. This functionality makes wikis ideal platforms to support research communities to curate data. However, without appropriate customization and a model to support data curation and collaborative editing of pages, wikis will fall sort in providing the functionalities needed to support collaborative work. In this paper, we present the architecture and design of a wiki platform, as well as a model that allow scientific communities, especially disaster response scientists, collaborative edit and append data to their wiki pages. Our experience in the implementation of the platform on Mediawiki demonstrates how wiki technologies can be used to support open collaboration, and how the dynamics of the FLOSS development process, its user and developer communities are increasingly informing our understanding about supporting collaboration and coordination in wiki environments. We conclude with best-practice guidelines for platform designers, and managers of systems that encourage collaborative authoring of web content.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.