Software Supply Chain Development and Application

Motivation: Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has become a critical componentin numerous devices and applications. Despite its importance, it is not clear why FLOSS ecosystem works so well or if it may cease to function. Majority of existing research is focusedon studying a specific software project or a portion of an ecosystem, but FLOSS has not been investigated in its entirety. Such view is necessary because of the deep and complex technical and social dependencies that go beyond the core of an individual ecosystem and tight inter-dependencies among ecosystems within FLOSS.Aim: We, therefore, aim to discover underlying relations within and across FLOSS projects and developers in open source community, mitigate potential risks induced by the lack of such knowledge and enable systematic analysis over entire open source community through the lens of supply chain (SC).Method: We utilize concepts from an area of supply chains to model risks of FLOSS ecosystem. FLOSS, due to the distributed decision making of software developers, technical dependencies, and copying of the code, has similarities to traditional supply chain. Unlike in traditional supply chain, where data is proprietary and distributed among players, we aim to measure open-source software supply chain (OSSC) by operationalizing supply chain concept in software domain using traces reconstructed from version control data.Results: We create a very large and frequently updated collection of version control data in the entire FLOSS ecosystems named World of Code (WoC), that can completely cross-reference authors, projects, commits, blobs, dependencies, and history of the FLOSS ecosystems, and provide capabilities to efficiently correct, augment, query, and analyze that data. Various researches and applications (e.g., software technology adoption investigation) have been successfully implemented by leveraging the combination of WoC and OSSC.Implications: With a SC perspective in FLOSS development and the increased visibility and transparency in OSSC, our work provides potential opportunities for researchers to conduct wider and deeper studies on OSS over entire FLOSS community, for developers to build more robust software and for students to learn technologies more efficiently and improve programming skills

OGRS2012 Symposium Proceedings

Do you remember the Open Source Geospatial Research and Education Symposium (OGRS) in Nantes? "Les Machines de l’Île", the Big Elephant, the "Storm Boat" with Claramunt, Petit et al. (2009), and "le Biniou et la Bombarde"? A second edition of OGRS was promised, and that promise is now fulfilled in OGRS 2012, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, October 24-26, 2012. OGRS is a meeting dedicated to sharing knowledge, new solutions, methods, practices, ideas and trends in the field of geospatial information through the development and the use of free and open source software in both research and education. In recent years, the development of geospatial free and open source software (GFOSS) has breathed new life into the geospatial domain. GFOSS has been extensively promoted by FOSS4G events, which evolved from meetings which gathered together interested GFOSS development communities to a standard business conference. More in line with the academic side of the FOSS4G conferences, OGRS is a rather neutral forum whose goal is to assemble a community whose main concern is to find new solutions by sharing knowledge and methods free of software license limits. This is why OGRS is primarily concerned with the academic world, though it also involves public institutions, organizations and companies interested in geospatial innovation. This symposium is therefore not an exhibition for presenting existing industrial software solutions, but an event we hope will act as a catalyst for research and innovation and new collaborations between research teams, public agencies and industries. An educational aspect has recently been added to the content of the symposium. This important addition examines the knowledge triangle - research, education, and innovation - through the lens of how open source methods can improve education efficiency. Based on their experience, OGRS contributors bring to the table ideas on how open source training is likely to offer pedagogical advantages to equip students with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in tomorrow’s geospatial labor market. OGRS brings together a large collection of current innovative research projects from around the world, with the goal of examining how research uses and contributes to open source initiatives. By presenting their research, OGRS contributors shed light on how the open-source approach impacts research, and vice-versa. The organizers of the symposium wish to demonstrate how the use and development of open source software strengthen education, research and innovation in geospatial fields. To support this approach, the present proceedings propose thirty short papers grouped under the following thematic headings: Education, Earth Science & Landscape, Data, Remote Sensing, Spatial Analysis, Urban Simulation and Tools. These papers are preceded by the contributions of the four keynote speakers: Prof Helena Mitasova, Dr Gérard Hégron, Prof Sergio Rey and Prof Robert Weibel, who share their expertise in research and education in order to highlight the decisive advantages of openness over the limits imposed by the closed-source license system

Dealing with clones in software : a practical approach from detection towards management

Despite the fact that duplicated fragments of code also called code clones are considered one of the prominent code smells that may exist in software, cloning is widely practiced in industrial development. The larger the system, the more people involved in its development and the more parts developed by different teams result in an increased possibility of having cloned code in the system. While there are particular benefits of code cloning in software development, research shows that it might be a source of various troubles in evolving software. Therefore, investigating and understanding clones in a software system is important to manage the clones efficiently. However, when the system is fairly large, it is challenging to identify and manage those clones properly. Among the various types of clones that may exist in software, research shows detection of near-miss clones where there might be minor to significant differences (e.g., renaming of identifiers and additions/deletions/modifications of statements) among the cloned fragments is costly in terms of time and memory. Thus, there is a great demand of state-of-the-art technologies in dealing with clones in software. Over the years, several tools have been developed to detect and visualize exact and similar clones. However, usually the tools are standalone and do not integrate well with a software developer's workflow. In this thesis, first, a study is presented on the effectiveness of a fingerprint based data similarity measurement technique named 'simhash' in detecting clones in large scale code-base. Based on the positive outcome of the study, a time efficient detection approach is proposed to find exact and near-miss clones in software, especially in large scale software systems. The novel detection approach has been made available as a highly configurable and fully fledged standalone clone detection tool named 'SimCad', which can be configured for detection of clones in both source code and non-source code based data. Second, we show a robust use of the clone detection approach studied earlier by assembling its detection service as a portable library named 'SimLib'. This library can provide tightly coupled (integrated) clone detection functionality to other applications as opposed to loosely coupled service provided by a typical standalone tool. Because of being highly configurable and easily extensible, this library allows the user to customize its clone detection process for detecting clones in data having diverse characteristics. We performed a user study to get some feedback on installation and use of the 'SimLib' API (Application Programming Interface) and to uncover its potential use as a third-party clone detection library. Third, we investigated on what tools and techniques are currently in use to detect and manage clones and understand their evolution. The goal was to find how those tools and techniques can be made available to a developer's own software development platform for convenient identification, tracking and management of clones in the software. Based on that, we developed a clone-aware software development platform named 'SimEclipse' to promote the practical use of code clone research and to provide better support for clone management in software. Finally, we evaluated 'SimEclipse' by conducting a user study on its effectiveness, usability and information management. We believe that both researchers and developers would enjoy and utilize the benefit of using these tools in different aspect of code clone research and manage cloned code in software systems

An Integrated Modeling Framework for Managing the Deployment and Operation of Cloud Applications

Cloud computing can help Software as a Service (SaaS) providers to take advantage of the sheer number of cloud benefits such as, agility, continuity, cost reduction, autonomy, and easy management of resources. To reap the benefits, SaaS providers should create their applications to utilize the cloud platform capabilities. However, this is a daunting task. First, it requires a full understanding of the service offerings from different providers, and the meta-data artifacts required by each provider to configure the platform to efficiently deploy, run and manage the application. Second, it involves complex decisions that are specified by different stakeholders. Examples include, financial decisions (e.g., selecting a platform to reduces costs), architectural decisions (e.g., partition the application to maximize scalability), and operational decisions (e.g., distributing modules to insure availability and porting the application to other platforms). Finally, while each stakeholder may conduct a certain type of change to address a specific concern, the impact of a change may span multiple models and influence the decisions of several stakeholders. These factors motivate the need for: (i) a new architectural view model that focuses on service operation and reflects the cloud stakeholder perspectives, and (ii) a novel framework that facilitates providing holistic as well as partial architectural views, and generating the required platform artifacts by fragmenting the model into artifacts that can be easily modified separately. This PhD research devises a novel architecture framework, "The 5+1 Architectural View Model", for cloud applications, in which each view corresponds to a different perspective on cloud application deployment. The architectural framework is realized as a cloud modeling framework, called "StratusML", which consists of a modeling language that uses layers to specify the cloud configuration space, and a transformation engine to generate the configuration space artifacts. The usefulness and practical applicability of StratusML to model multi-cloud and multi-tenant applications have been demonstrated though a representative domain example. Moreover, to automate the framework evolution as new concerns and cloud platforms emerge, this research work introduces also a novel schema matching technique, called "Liberate". Liberate supports the process of domain model creation, evolution, and transformations. Liberate helps solve the vendor lock-in problem by reducing the manual efforts required to map complex correspondences between cloud schemas whose domain concepts do not share linguistic similarities. The evaluation of Liberate shows its superiority in the cloud domain over existing schema matching approaches

Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

The Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications brings together diverse technical and scientific work in order to help those who employ AI methods in space applications to identify common goals and to address issues of general interest in the AI community. Topics include the following: automation for Space Station; intelligent control, testing, and fault diagnosis; robotics and vision; planning and scheduling; simulation, modeling, and tutoring; development tools and automatic programming; knowledge representation and acquisition; and knowledge base/data base integration