Version Control in Online Software Repositories

Software version control repositories provide a uniform and stable interface to manage documents and their version histories. Unfortunately, Open Source systems, for example, CVS, Subversion, and GNU Arch are not well suited to highly collaborative environments and fail to track semantic changes in repositories. We introduce document provenance as our Description Logic framework to track the semantic changes in software repositories and draw interesting results about their historic behaviour using a rule-based inference engine. To support the use of this framework, we have developed our own online collaborative tool, leveraging the fluency of the modern WikiWikiWeb

Version Control in Online Software Repositories

Software version control repositories provide a uniform and stable interface to manage documents and their version histories. Unfortunately, Open Source systems, for example, CVS, Subversion, and GNU Arch are not well suited to highly collaborative environments and fail to track semantic changes in repositories. We introduce document provenance as our Description Logic framework to track the semantic changes in software repositories and draw interesting results about their historic behaviour using a rule-based inference engine. To support the use of this framework, we have developed our own online collaborative tool, leveraging the fluency of the modern WikiWikiWeb

Should heritage management be democratized? The Denkmalpflegediskussion in Germany.

This paper is about the recent discussions (known as Denkmalpflegediskussion) on the general organization of heritage management in Germany. The main issue discussed was whether heritage management should be further denationalized (’entstaatlicht’) and made the responsibility of individual citizens in order to serve better both the monuments and the people. A number of fundamental criticisms were made concerning existing practices of heritage management, some of which were said to alienate and patronize people despite opposite intentions. In the course of the public exchange of views various alternatives were suggested and discussed. In particular, more influence should be given to the owners. The overriding criterion for scheduling should be a site’s ability to move people, in other words its ’beauty’ rather than some complex academic reasoning about historical significance. This paper will review the polarized debate that ensued, summarize the main arguments that were made, and discuss emerging key issues in the light of the existing discussion in Sweden, for example in the context of the Agenda Kulturarv project. Should heritage management in a democratic society be liberalized to the extent that it becomes a matter for local communities and individual citizens rather than for the state

Open Access zwischen Revolution und Goldesel. Eine Bilanz fünfzehn Jahre nach der Erklärung der Budapest Open Access Initiative

Open Access war anfangs der 2000er Jahre von Umbruchstimmung, Euphorie und Idealismus getragen. Die Erwartungen waren klar umrissen: Wissenschaftlern war an rascher Verbreitung wissenschaftlicher Texte gelegen, Bibliothekaren an einer Abhilfe für stark steigende Journalpreise, den Wissenschaftseinrichtungen an effizienter und freier Verbreitung ihrer Inhalte. Einzig die Position der kommerziellen Wissenschaftsverlage zu Open Access war überwiegend zögerlich bis ablehnend. 15 Jahre nach dem Treffen der Budapest Open Access Initiative muss 2016 festgehalten werden, dass die erhoffte Revolution wohl ausbleiben wird. Vielmehr scheint Open Access heute weitgehend von den vormals in Szenarien kaum erwähnten kommerziellen Verlagen angetrieben. Zwar findet sich auch Open Access in wissenschaftlicher Selbstverwaltung, dennoch bleiben die Akteure im wissenschaftlichen Publizieren bislang die gleichen wie 2001 und die schon damals bekannten Konzentrationseffekte am Publikationsmarkt setzen sich fort. In the early 2000s Open Access spread a mood of upheaval, euphoria, and idealism. The expectations were obvious: scientists wanted to share their own articles immediately with other scientist, librarians needed a remedy for exploding journal prices, the scientific institutions wanted funded research to be efficiently and freely disseminated. Only the position of the commercial publishers to Open Access was predominantly hesitant or even disapproving. 2016 - 15 years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative meeting - it must be noted that the hopes for a revolution will be disappointed. On the contrary, today Open Access seems to be largely driven by the commercial publishers, which were barely mentioned in the early Open Access scenarios. Although there non-commercial Open Access in scientific self-administration exists, today the actors in scientific publishing are still the same as in 2001, and the already known concentration effects on the publishing market continue

The Meta-data-Database of a Next Generation Sustainability Web-Platform for Language Resources

Our goal is to provide a web-based platform for the long-term preservation and distribution of a heterogeneous collection of linguistic resources. We discuss the corpus preprocessing and normalisation phase that results in sets of multi-rooted trees. At the same time we transform the original metadata records, just like the corpora annotated using different annotation approaches and exhibiting different levels of granularity, into the all-encompassing and highly flexible format eTEI for which we present editing and parsing tools. We also discuss the architecture of the sustainability platform. Its primary components are an XML database that contains corpus and metadata files and an SQL database that contains user accounts and access control lists. A staging area, whose structure, contents, and consistency can be checked using tools, is used to make sure that new resources about to be imported into the platform have the correct structure

From a Link Semantic to Semantic Links - Building Context in Educational Hypermedia

Modularization and granulation are key concepts in educational content management, whereas teaching, learning and understanding require a discourse within thematic contexts. Even though hyperlinks and semantically typed references provide the context building blocks of hypermedia systems, elaborate concepts to derive, manage and propagate such relations between content objects are not around at present. Based on Semantic Web standards, this paper makes several contributions to content enrichment. Work starts from harvesting multimedia annotations in class-room recordings, and proceeds to deriving a dense educational semantic net between eLearning Objects decorated with extended LOM relations. Special focus is drawn on the processing of recorded speech and on an Ontological Evaluation Layer that autonomously derives meaningful inter-object relations. Further on, a semantic representation of hyperlinks is developed and elaborated to the concept of semantic link contexts, an approach to manage a coherent rhetoric of linking. These solutions have been implemented in the Hypermedia Learning Objects System (hylOs), our eLearning content management system. hylOs is built upon the more general Media Information Repository (MIR) and the MIR adaptive context linking environment (MIRaCLE), its linking extension. MIR is an open system supporting the standards XML and JNDI. hylOs benefits from configurable information structures, sophisticated access logic and high-level authoring tools like the WYSIWYG XML editor and its Instructional Designer.Comment: Summary of several conference article

Design and evaluation of acceleration strategies for speeding up the development of dialog applications

In this paper, we describe a complete development platform that features different innovative acceleration strategies, not included in any other current platform, that simplify and speed up the definition of the different elements required to design a spoken dialog service. The proposed accelerations are mainly based on using the information from the backend database schema and contents, as well as cumulative information produced throughout the different steps in the design. Thanks to these accelerations, the interaction between the designer and the platform is improved, and in most cases the design is reduced to simple confirmations of the “proposals” that the platform dynamically provides at each step. In addition, the platform provides several other accelerations such as configurable templates that can be used to define the different tasks in the service or the dialogs to obtain or show information to the user, automatic proposals for the best way to request slot contents from the user (i.e. using mixed-initiative forms or directed forms), an assistant that offers the set of more probable actions required to complete the definition of the different tasks in the application, or another assistant for solving specific modality details such as confirmations of user answers or how to present them the lists of retrieved results after querying the backend database. Additionally, the platform also allows the creation of speech grammars and prompts, database access functions, and the possibility of using mixed initiative and over-answering dialogs. In the paper we also describe in detail each assistant in the platform, emphasizing the different kind of methodologies followed to facilitate the design process at each one. Finally, we describe the results obtained in both a subjective and an objective evaluation with different designers that confirm the viability, usefulness, and functionality of the proposed accelerations. Thanks to the accelerations, the design time is reduced in more than 56% and the number of keystrokes by 84%

Implementation of Turing machines with the Scufl data-flow language

International audienceIn this paper, the expressiveness of the simple Scufl data-flow language is studied by showing how it can be used to implement Turing machines. To do that, several non trivial Scufl patterns such as self-looping or sub-workflows are required and we precisely explicit them. The main result of this work is to show how a complex workflow can be implemented using a very simple data-flow language. Beyond that, it shows that Scufl is a Turing complete language, given some restrictions that we discuss