An inventory of state natural resources information systems

The status of a project to inventory state natural resources information systems is summarized. All tasks accomplished are described, and tasks remaining to be completed are outlined

Building National Forest and Land-Use Information Systems: Lessons from Cameroon, Indonesia, and Peru

This working paper examines the institutional, human resources, and financial capacities of three countries that have developed a forest and land-use information system, and highlights common enabling factors and challenges

Implications and effectiveness of information management while restructuring an organisation

This research paper undertakes to outline factors of Information Management that organisations should consider when attempting a restructuring process. Conversely, valuable information and knowledge are often mislaid, overlooked or discarded to the eventual detriment of an organisation during the processes of downsizing, rightsizing, restructuring, reorganisation, reengineering, transformation or change. In the global economy organisations are always striving to keep ahead of competition and ultimately to improve their net profit. Information is at the very core of any organisation, its ads value, structure and power to an organisation. Information Management assists with the locating, storing and use of corporate information. A means of controlling and structuring corporate information is via the use of the Information Management elements. A case study using an organisation that is in the process of change and transformation was performed. Potential loss of knowledge and information was identified and examined. The organisation’s implementation of an information portal was highlighted as an effective way to minimise the loss of knowledge and information during the period of change.Professor A.S.A. du Toi

A scoping assessment for a national research centre addressing land use and food security issues

This report proposes a Centre for Land Use and Land Resources to conduct an Australian program of work on agricultural land use and food security analysis, linked to international efforts.SummaryInternationally, food security and the sustainability of productive land resources have been identified as key issues driving the need for improved information on land use change and land resources.This study reports on perspectives on land use and food security issues gained through consultations with international and Australian institutions and individuals, including the relationship between land use and food security. It also scopes Australia’s potential contribution to addressing global food security concerns, including the potential for an Australian-based Centre for Land Use and Food Security as a facility associated with the Global Land Project (GLP). The GLP is an international program aimed at analysing changes in land systems arising from human-induced global change.The review determined that land use and land use change impacts on a broad range of natural resource and ecosystem services sustainability issues – including water management, biodiversity protection, urban planning development, carbon management and responding to climate variability. Although the nexus between land use and food security is strong and is of particular interest, there are broader interests and needs regarding national capacity in land use research.It is argued that this broader range of needs, including food security, could be improved by focusing Australia’s capacity to analyse and track land use change particularly in relation to our productive land assets. This would address the Australian Farm Institute’s recent call for improved data and analysis to assess land use change and agricultural production potential.The study proposes the establishment of a Centre for Land Use and Land Resources. This centre could be a virtual organisation, operating on a collaborative basis and drawing on the expertise of Australian agencies and research institutions with allied interests and objectives. It could initiate an Australian program of work linked to international efforts on agricultural land use and food security analysis and make an important contribution to global activities linking food security, land use and land resources risk assessment, particularly the development of protocols for tracking and forecasting change and the development of tools to assist decision making.Within this network a Nodal Office of the GLP with a focus on land use and food security could be hosted out of a leading research or academic institution, linking the relevant researchers in government research agencies and universities with international collaborators. Research could be aimed at key gaps in the GLP research agenda, such as international trends in food, fibre and fuel, and the sustainability of land resources.It is suggested that the options for hosting a Centre for Land Use and Land Resources be explored with national institutions with interest and capacity in the land use and land resources sciences field. ABARES is well positioned to continue playing a leadership role for the Australian Government, building on established collaborative arrangements and with a continuing focus on promoting national consistency in land use data, information and analysis to support policy and programs.It is proposed that ABARES establish a working group comprising representatives from potential partners in a Centre for Land Use and Land Resources (including, CSIRO, TERN, key universities, NCLUMI and NCST) to further explore options for its establishment, including structure, partnership arrangements, research agenda work-plan and funding

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

The Co-Evolution of Test Maintenance and Code Maintenance through the lens of Fine-Grained Semantic Changes

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase, following the initial release. In this work we conduct a large scale study of 61 popular open source projects and report the relationships we have established between test maintenance, production code maintenance, and semantic changes (e.g, statement added, method removed, etc.). performed in developers' commits. We build predictive models, and show that the number of tests in a software project can be well predicted by employing code maintenance profiles (i.e., how many commits were performed in each of the maintenance activities: corrective, perfective, adaptive). Our findings also reveal that more often than not, developers perform code fixes without performing complementary test maintenance in the same commit (e.g., update an existing test or add a new one). When developers do perform test maintenance, it is likely to be affected by the semantic changes they perform as part of their commit. Our work is based on studying 61 popular open source projects, comprised of over 240,000 commits consisting of over 16,000,000 semantic change type instances, performed by over 4,000 software engineers.Comment: postprint, ICSME 201

2011 Strategic roadmap for Australian research infrastructure

The 2011 Roadmap articulates the priority research infrastructure areas of a national scale (capability areas) to further develop Australia’s research capacity and improve innovation and research outcomes over the next five to ten years. The capability areas have been identified through considered analysis of input provided by stakeholders, in conjunction with specialist advice from Expert Working Groups   It is intended the Strategic Framework will provide a high-level policy framework, which will include principles to guide the development of policy advice and the design of programs related to the funding of research infrastructure by the Australian Government. Roadmapping has been identified in the Strategic Framework Discussion Paper as the most appropriate prioritisation mechanism for national, collaborative research infrastructure. The strategic identification of Capability areas through a consultative roadmapping process was also validated in the report of the 2010 NCRIS Evaluation. The 2011 Roadmap is primarily concerned with medium to large-scale research infrastructure. However, any landmark infrastructure (typically involving an investment in excess of $100 million over five years from the Australian Government) requirements identified in this process will be noted. NRIC has also developed a ‘Process to identify and prioritise Australian Government landmark research infrastructure investments’ which is currently under consideration by the government as part of broader deliberations relating to research infrastructure. NRIC will have strategic oversight of the development of the 2011 Roadmap as part of its overall policy view of research infrastructure

Software development process mining: discovery, conformance checking and enhancement

Context. Modern software projects require the proper allocation of human, technical and financial resources. Very often, project managers make decisions supported only by their personal experience, intuition or simply by mirroring activities performed by others in similar contexts. Most attempts to avoid such practices use models based on lines of code, cyclomatic complexity or effort estimators, thus commonly supported by software repositories which are known to contain several flaws. Objective. Demonstrate the usefulness of process data and mining methods to enhance the software development practices, by assessing efficiency and unveil unknown process insights, thus contributing to the creation of novel models within the software development analytics realm. Method. We mined the development process fragments of multiple developers in three different scenarios by collecting Integrated Development Environment (IDE) events during their development sessions. Furthermore, we used process and text mining to discovery developers’ workflows and their fingerprints, respectively. Results. We discovered and modeled with good quality developers’ processes during programming sessions based on events extracted from their IDEs. We unveiled insights from coding practices in distinct refactoring tasks, built accurate software complexity forecast models based only on process metrics and setup a method for characterizing coherently developers’ behaviors. The latter may ultimately lead to the creation of a catalog of software development process smells. Conclusions. Our approach is agnostic to programming languages, geographic location or development practices, making it suitable for challenging contexts such as in modern global software development projects using either traditional IDEs or sophisticated low/no code platforms.Contexto. Projetos de software modernos requerem a correta alocação de recursos humanos, técnicos e financeiros. Frequentemente, os gestores de projeto tomam decisões suportadas apenas na sua própria experiência, intuição ou simplesmente espelhando atividades executadas por terceiros em contextos similares. As tentativas para evitar tais práticas baseiam-se em modelos que usam linhas de código, a complexidade ciclomática ou em estimativas de esforço, sendo estes tradicionalmente suportados por repositórios de software conhecidos por conterem várias limitações. Objetivo. Demonstrar a utilidade dos dados de processo e respetivos métodos de análise na melhoria das práticas de desenvolvimento de software, colocando o foco na análise da eficiência e revelando aspetos dos processos até então desconhecidos, contribuindo para a criação de novos modelos no contexto de análises avançadas para o desenvolvimento de software. Método. Explorámos os fragmentos de processo de vários programadores em três cenários diferentes, recolhendo eventos durante as suas sessões de desenvolvimento no IDE. Adicionalmente, usámos métodos de descoberta e análise de processos e texto no sentido de modelar o fluxo de trabalho dos programadores e as suas características individuais, respetivamente. Resultados. Descobrimos e modelámos com boa qualidade os processos dos programadores durante as suas sessões de trabalho, usando eventos provenientes dos seus IDEs. Revelámos factos desconhecidos sobre práticas de refabricação, construímos modelos de previsão da complexidade ciclomática usando apenas métricas de processo e criámos um método para caracterizar coerentemente os comportamentos dos programadores. Este último, pode levar à criação de um catálogo de boas/más práticas no processo de desenvolvimento de software. Conclusões. A nossa abordagem é agnóstica em termos de linguagens de programação, localização geográfica ou prática de desenvolvimento, tornando-a aplicável em contextos complexos tal como em projetos modernos de desenvolvimento global que utilizam tanto os IDEs tradicionais como as atuais e sofisticadas plataformas "low/no code"