Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Resources Events Agents (REA), a text DSL for OMNIA Entities

The Numbersbelieve has been developing the OMNIA platform. This is a web application platform for developing applications using Low-code principles, using Agile approaches. Modeling Entities is an application that is used on the platform to create new entities. The OMNIA Entity concept has the following properties: Agents, Commitments, Documents, Events, entities, Resources or Series. Most of these concepts are in accordance with the Resources Events Agents (REA) ontology but are not formalized. One of the goals of Numbersbelieve is a formalization of the REA concepts according to the ontology for the application that creates entities on OMNIA platform and later for other applications. REA defines an enterprise ontology developed by McCarthy (1979, 1982) has its origin in accounting database systems. Later Geerts and McCarthy (2002, 2006) extended the original model with new concepts. To formalize the concepts of the REA ontology, this research shows the development of a textual Domain-Specific Language (DSL) based on the development methodology Model Driven Engineering (MDE) which focuses software development on models. This simplifies the engineering processes as it represents the actions and behaviors of a system even before the start of the coding phase. This research is structured according to the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). The Design Science (DS) is a methodology for solving problems that seek to innovate by creating useful artifacts that define practices, projects and implementations and is therefore suitable for this research. This research developed three artifacts for the formalization of the DSL, a meta-model the abstract syntax, a textual language the concrete syntax and a Json file for interaction with OMNIA. The first phase of DSRM was to identify the problem that was mentioned above. The following focuses on the identification of requirements which identified the REA concepts to be included in the meta-model and textual language. Subsequently, the development of the artifacts and the editor of the language. The editor allows use cases, provided by the Numbersbelieve team, to be defined with the DSL language, correct faults and improve the language. The results were evaluated according the objectives and requirements, all successfully completed. Based on the analysis of the artifacts, the use of the language and the interaction with the OMNIA platform, through the Json file, it is concluded that the use of the DSL language is suitable to interact with the OMNIA platform through the Application Program Interface (API) and helped demonstrate that other applications on the platform could be modeled using a REA approach.A Numbersbelieve tem vindo a desenvolver a plataforma OMNIA. Esta plataforma é uma aplicação web para o desenvolvimento de aplicações usando princípios Low-code, usando abordagens Agile. Modeling Entities é a aplicação que é usada na plataforma para criar novas entidades. O conceito OMNIA de Entidade tem as seguintes propriedades: Agents, Commitments, Documents, Events, Generic entities, Resources or Series. A maior parte destes conceitos estão de acordo com a ontologia REA mas não estão formalizados. Um dos objetivos da Numbersbelieve é ter uma formalização dos conceitos REA de acordo com a ontologia para a aplicação que cria as entidades na plataforma OMNIA e posteriormente para as outras aplicações. REA define uma ontologia empresarial desenvolvida por McCarthy (1979, 1982) tem sua origem nos sistemas de base de dados para contabilidade. Mais tarde Geerts and McCarthy (2002, 2006) estenderam o modelo original com novos conceitos. Para formalizar os conceitos da ontologia REA, esta pesquisa mostra o desenvolvimento de uma DSL textual com base na metodologia de desenvolvimento MDE que foca o desenvolvimento de software no modelo. Esta simplifica os processos de engenharia pois representa as ações e comportamentos de um sistema mesmo antes do início da fase de codificação. A pesquisa está estruturada de acordo com a DSRM. O DS é uma metodologia para resolver problemas que procuram inovar criando artefactos úteis que definem práticas, projetos e implementações e por isso é adequado a esta pesquisa que desenvolveu três artefactos para a formalização da DSL, um meta-modelo a sintaxe abstrata, uma linguagem textual a sintaxe concreta e um ficheiro Json para interação com a plataforma OMNIA. A primeira fase do DSRM foi identificar o problema que foi referido em cima. A seguinte concentra-se na identificação dos requisitos que identificaram os conceitos REA a serem incluídos no meta-modelo e na linguagem textual. Posteriormente, é feito o desenvolvimento dos artefactos e do editor da linguagem. O editor permite definir, com a DSL, os casos de uso fornecidos pela equipa da Numbersbelieve, corrigir falhas e melhorar a linguagem. Os resultados foram avaliados de acordo com o cumprimento dos requisitos. Foram todos foram concluídos com êxito. Com base na análise dos artefactos, do uso da linguagem e da interação com a plataforma OMNIA, através do ficheiro Json, conclui-se que a utilização da linguagem é adequada para interagir com a plataforma OMNIA através da sua API e ajudou a demonstrar que outras aplicações da plataforma podem ser modeladas usando uma abordagem REA

Engaging without over-powering: A case study of a FLOSS project

This is the post-print version of the published chapter. The original publication is available at the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.The role of Open Source Software (OSS) in the e-learning business has become more and more fundamental in the last 10 years, as long as corporate and government organizations have developed their educational and training programs based on OSS out-of-the-box tools. This paper qualitatively documents the decision of the largest UK e-learning provider, the Open University, to adopt the Moodle e-learning system, and how it has been successfully deployed in its site after a multi-million investment. A further quantitative study also provides evidence of how a commercial stakeholder has been engaged with, and produced outputs for, the Moodle community. Lessons learned from this experience by the stakeholders include the crucial factors of contributing to the OSS community, and adapting to an evolving technology. It also becomes evident how commercial partners helped this OSS system to achieve the transition from an “average” OSS system to a successful multi-site, collaborative and community-based OSS project