Similarities, challenges and opportunities of wikipedia content and open source projects

Copyright @ 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Several years of research and evidence have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, developed by relatively small communities, struggling to attract a sustained number of contributors. These portals have started to increasingly act as a storage for abandoned projects, and researchers and practitioners should try and point out how to take advantage of such content. Similarly, other online content portals (like Wikipedia) could be harvested for valuable content. In this paper we argue that, even with differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on content and contributions by users undergo a similar evolution, and follow similar patterns: when a project fails to attract contributors, it appears to be not evolving, or abandoned. Far from a negative finding, even those projects could provide valuable content that should be harvested and identified based on common characteristics: by using the attributes of “usefulness” and “modularity” we isolate valuable content in both Wikipedia pages and OSS projects

Towards a flexible open-source software library for multi-layered scholarly textual studies: An Arabic case study dealing with semi-automatic language processing

This paper presents both the general model and a case study of the Computational and Collaborative Philology Library (CoPhiLib), an ongoing initiative underway at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR), Pisa, Italy. The library, designed and organized as a reusable, abstract and open-source software component, aims at solving the needs of multi-lingual and cross-lingual analysis by exposing common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The core modules, coded by the Java programming language, constitute the groundwork of a Web platform designed to deal with textual scholarly needs. The Web application, implemented according to the Java Enterprise specifications, focuses on multi-layered analysis for the study of literary documents and related multimedia sources. This ambitious challenge seeks to obtain the management of textual resources, on the one hand by abstracting from current language, on the other hand by decoupling from the specific requirements of single projects. This goal is achieved thanks to methodologies declared by the 'agile process', and by putting into effect suitable use case modeling, design patterns, and component-based architectures. The reusability and flexibility of the system have been tested on an Arabic case study: the system allows users to choose the morphological engine (such as AraMorph or Al-Khalil), along with linguistic granularity (i.e. with or without declension). Finally, the application enables the construction of annotated resources for further statistical engines (training set). © 2014 IEEE

A Modular Toolkit for Distributed Interactions

We discuss the design, architecture, and implementation of a toolkit which supports some theories for distributed interactions. The main design principles of our architecture are flexibility and modularity. Our main goal is to provide an easily extensible workbench to encompass current algorithms and incorporate future developments of the theories. With the help of some examples, we illustrate the main features of our toolkit.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2010, arXiv:1110.385

Adaptive content mapping for internet navigation

The Internet as the biggest human library ever assembled keeps on growing. Although all kinds of information carriers (e.g. audio/video/hybrid file formats) are available, text based documents dominate. It is estimated that about 80% of all information worldwide stored electronically exists in (or can be converted into) text form. More and more, all kinds of documents are generated by means of a text processing system and are therefore available electronically. Nowadays, many printed journals are also published online and may even discontinue to appear in print form tomorrow. This development has many convincing advantages: the documents are both available faster (cf. prepress services) and cheaper, they can be searched more easily, the physical storage only needs a fraction of the space previously necessary and the medium will not age. For most people, fast and easy access is the most interesting feature of the new age; computer-aided search for specific documents or Web pages becomes the basic tool for information-oriented work. But this tool has problems. The current keyword based search machines available on the Internet are not really appropriate for such a task; either there are (way) too many documents matching the specified keywords are presented or none at all. The problem lies in the fact that it is often very difficult to choose appropriate terms describing the desired topic in the first place. This contribution discusses the current state-of-the-art techniques in content-based searching (along with common visualization/browsing approaches) and proposes a particular adaptive solution for intuitive Internet document navigation, which not only enables the user to provide full texts instead of manually selected keywords (if available), but also allows him/her to explore the whole database