LAGOVirtual: A Collaborative Environment for the Large Aperture GRB Observatory

We present the LAGOVirtual Project: an ongoing project to develop platform to collaborate in the Large Aperture GRB Observatory (LAGO). This continental-wide observatory is devised to detect high energy (around 100 GeV) component of Gamma Ray Bursts, by using the single particle technique in arrays of Water Cherenkov Detectors (WCD) at high mountain sites (Chacaltaya, Bolivia, 5300 m a.s.l., Pico Espejo, Venezuela, 4750 m a.s.l., Sierra Negra, Mexico, 4650 m a.s.l). This platform will allow LAGO collaboration to share data, and computer resources through its different sites. This environment has the possibility to generate synthetic data by simulating the showers through AIRES application and to store/preserve distributed data files collected by the WCD at the LAGO sites. The present article concerns the implementation of a prototype of LAGO-DR adapting DSpace, with a hierarchical structure (i.e. country, institution, followed by collections that contain the metadata and data files), for the captured/simulated data. This structure was generated by using the community, sub-community, collection, item model; available at the DSpace software. Each member institution-country of the project has the appropriate permissions on the system to publish information (descriptive metadata and associated data files). The platform can also associate multiple files to each item of data (data from the instruments, graphics, postprocessed-data, etc.).Comment: Second EELA-2 Conference Choroni, Venezuela, November 25th to 27th 200

CHAIN-REDS DART Challenge

CHAIN-REDS (Coordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-infrastructure for Research and Education Data Sharing) is EU project focused on promoting and supporting technological and scientific collaboration across different communities established in various continents. Nowadays, one of the most challenging scenarios scientist and scientific communities are facing is huge amount of data emerging from vast networks of sensors and form computational simulations performed in a diversity of computing architectures and e-infrastructure. The new knowledge coming out from the interpretation of these datasets, reported on the scholar literature, is increasingly problematic to be reproducible due to the difficulty to access measured data repositories and/or computational applications that generate synthetic data through computer simulations. This paper presents CHAIN REDS approach, several tools and services, based on the adoption of standards, aimed at providing easy/seamless access to datasets, data repositories, open access document repositories and to the applications that could make use of them. All these tools and services are enclosed in what we have called the Data Accessibility, Reproducibility and Trustworthiness (DART) challenge. This initiative allows researchers to easily find data of his interest and directly use them in a code running by means of a Science Gateway (SG) that provides access to cluster, Grid and Cloud infrastructure worldwide. In this scenario, the datasets are found by means of either the CHAIN-REDS Knowledge Base (KB) or the Semantic Search Engine (SSE), the applications ran on the CHAIN-REDS SG, accessible through an Identity Federation. The datasets can be both identified by Persistent Identifier (PID) and assigned unique number ID. Scientists can then access the data and the corresponding application in order to either reproduce and extend the results of a given study or start a new investigation. The new data (and the new paper if any) are stored on the Data Infrastructure and can be easily found by the people belonging to the same domain making possible to start the cycle again.Repositório de dados científicos.Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC

How do you architect your robots?:State of the practice and guidelines for ros-based systems

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the de-facto standard for robotic software. If on one hand ROS is helping roboticists, e.g., by providing a standardized communication platform, on the other hand ROS-based systems are getting larger and more complex and could benefit from good software architecture practices. This paper presents an observational study aimed at (i) unveiling the state-ofthe- practice for architecting ROS-based systems and (ii) providing guidance to roboticists about how to properly architect ROS-based systems. To achieve these goals, we (i) build a dataset of 335 GitHub repositories containing real open-source ROS-based systems, (ii) mine the repositories for extracting the state of the practice about how roboticists are architecting them, and (iii) synthesize a catalog of 49 evidence-based guidelines for architecting ROS-based systems. The guidelines have been validated by 77 roboticists working on real-world open-source ROS-based systems

Interoperable e-Infrastructure Services in Arabia

e-Infrastructures became critical platforms that integrate computational resources, facilities and repositories globally. The coordination and harmonization of advanced e-Infrastructure project developed with partners from Europe, Latin America, Arabia, Africa, China, and India contributed to developing interoperable platforms based on identity federation and science gateway technologies. This paper presents these technologies to support key services in the development of Arabia networking and services platform for research and education. The platform provides scientists, teachers, and students with seamless access to a variety of advanced resources, services, and applications available at regional e-Infrastructures in Europe and elsewhere. Users simply enter the credentials provided by their home institutions to get authenticated and do not need digital certificate-based mechanisms. Twenty applications from five scientific domains were deployed and integrated. Results showed that on average about 35,000 monthly jobs are running for a total of about 17,500 CPU wall-clock hours. Therefore, seamlessly integrated e-Infrastructures for regional e-Science activities are important resources that support scientists, students, and faculty with computational services and linkage to global research communities

A Tool for Identifying Swarm Intelligence on a Free/Open Source Software Mailing List

A software tool designed using the concepts of swarm intelligence and text mining is proposed as an aid in the analysis of free/open source software (FOSS) development communities. A prototype of the tool collects textual data from an electronic mailing list, a primary mode of FOSS developer communication. The tool enables a user to compare patterns of discussion topics found in the text with patterns of swarm intelligence. The research of this design is congruent with Madey et al.‟s (2002) observation that the open source software development phenomenon shows an emergent behavior and can be modeled after agent-based, biologically-inspired swarms. The goal of a tool for identifying emergent intelligence on FOSS mailing lists is to increasing the user‟s understanding of a given FOSS development community

Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.Comment: Paper accepted at 25th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 1-11, 201