2 research outputs found
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The ownership of digital infrastructure: Exploring the deployment of software libraries in a digital innovation cluster
Boundary resources have been shown to enable the arm’s-length relationships between platform owners and third-party developers that underlie digital innovation in platform ecosystems. While boundary resources that are owned by open-source communities and smaller-scale software vendors are also critical components in the digital infrastructure, their role in digital innovation has yet to be systematically explored. In particular, software libraries are popular boundary resources that provide functionality without the need for continued interaction with their owners. They are used extensively by commercial vendors to enable customization of their software products, by communities to disseminate open-source software, and by big-tech platform owners to provide functionality that does not involve control. This paper reports on the deployment of such software libraries in the web and mobile (Android) contexts by 107 startup companies in London. Our findings show that libraries owned by big-tech companies, product vendors, and communities coexist; that the deployment of big-tech libraries is unaffected by the scale of the deploying startup; and that context evolution paths are consequential for library deployment. These findings portray a balanced picture of digital infrastructure as neither the community-based utopia of early open-source research nor the dystopia of the recent digital dominance literature
Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbilTS) framework : a solution for building complex multimodal data capture and interactive systems
Contemporary Data Capture and Interactive Systems (DCIS) systems are tied in with various
technical complexities such as multimodal data types, diverse hardware and software
components, time synchronisation issues and distributed deployment configurations. Building
these systems is inherently difficult and requires addressing of these complexities before the
intended and purposeful functionalities can be attained. The technical issues are often
common and similar among diverse applications.
This thesis presents the Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbiITS)
framework, a generic solution to address the technical complexities in building DCISs. The
proposed solution is an abstract software framework that can be extended and customised to
any application requirements. UbiITS includes all fundamental software components,
techniques, system level layer abstractions and reference architecture as a collection to enable
the systematic construction of complex DCISs.
This work details four case studies to showcase the versatility and extensibility of UbiITS
framework’s functionalities and demonstrate how it was employed to successfully solve a
range of technical requirements. In each case UbiITS operated as the core element of each
application. Additionally, these case studies are novel systems by themselves in each of their
domains. Longstanding technical issues such as flexibly integrating and interoperating
multimodal tools, precise time synchronisation, etc., were resolved in each application by
employing UbiITS. The framework enabled establishing a functional system infrastructure in
these cases, essentially opening up new lines of research in each discipline where these
research approaches would not have been possible without the infrastructure provided by the
framework. The thesis further presents a sample implementation of the framework on a
device firmware exhibiting its capability to be directly implemented on a hardware platform.
Summary metrics are also produced to establish the complexity, reusability, extendibility,
implementation and maintainability characteristics of the framework.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grants - EP/F02553X/1, 114433 and 11394