517 research outputs found
Open Source Software: From Open Science to New Marketing Models
-Open source Software; Intellectual Property; Licensing; Business Model.
Historical collaborative geocoding
The latest developments in digital have provided large data sets that can
increasingly easily be accessed and used. These data sets often contain
indirect localisation information, such as historical addresses. Historical
geocoding is the process of transforming the indirect localisation information
to direct localisation that can be placed on a map, which enables spatial
analysis and cross-referencing. Many efficient geocoders exist for current
addresses, but they do not deal with the temporal aspect and are based on a
strict hierarchy (..., city, street, house number) that is hard or impossible
to use with historical data. Indeed historical data are full of uncertainties
(temporal aspect, semantic aspect, spatial precision, confidence in historical
source, ...) that can not be resolved, as there is no way to go back in time to
check. We propose an open source, open data, extensible solution for geocoding
that is based on the building of gazetteers composed of geohistorical objects
extracted from historical topographical maps. Once the gazetteers are
available, geocoding an historical address is a matter of finding the
geohistorical object in the gazetteers that is the best match to the historical
address. The matching criteriae are customisable and include several dimensions
(fuzzy semantic, fuzzy temporal, scale, spatial precision ...). As the goal is
to facilitate historical work, we also propose web-based user interfaces that
help geocode (one address or batch mode) and display over current or historical
topographical maps, so that they can be checked and collaboratively edited. The
system is tested on Paris city for the 19-20th centuries, shows high returns
rate and is fast enough to be used interactively.Comment: WORKING PAPE
Contracts in Practice
Contracts are a form of lightweight formal specification embedded in the
program text. Being executable parts of the code, they encourage programmers to
devote proper attention to specifications, and help maintain consistency
between specification and implementation as the program evolves. The present
study investigates how contracts are used in the practice of software
development. Based on an extensive empirical analysis of 21 contract-equipped
Eiffel, C#, and Java projects totaling more than 260 million lines of code over
7700 revisions, it explores, among other questions: 1) which kinds of contract
elements (preconditions, postconditions, class invariants) are used more often;
2) how contracts evolve over time; 3) the relationship between implementation
changes and contract changes; and 4) the role of inheritance in the process. It
has found, among other results, that: the percentage of program elements that
include contracts is above 33% for most projects and tends to be stable over
time; there is no strong preference for a certain type of contract element;
contracts are quite stable compared to implementations; and inheritance does
not significantly affect qualitative trends of contract usage
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