Git4Voc: Git-based Versioning for Collaborative Vocabulary Development

Collaborative vocabulary development in the context of data integration is the process of finding consensus between the experts of the different systems and domains. The complexity of this process is increased with the number of involved people, the variety of the systems to be integrated and the dynamics of their domain. In this paper we advocate that the realization of a powerful version control system is the heart of the problem. Driven by this idea and the success of Git in the context of software development, we investigate the applicability of Git for collaborative vocabulary development. Even though vocabulary development and software development have much more similarities than differences there are still important differences. These need to be considered within the development of a successful versioning and collaboration system for vocabulary development. Therefore, this paper starts by presenting the challenges we were faced with during the creation of vocabularies collaboratively and discusses its distinction to software development. Based on these insights we propose Git4Voc which comprises guidelines how Git can be adopted to vocabulary development. Finally, we demonstrate how Git hooks can be implemented to go beyond the plain functionality of Git by realizing vocabulary-specific features like syntactic validation and semantic diffs

Herding a Deluge of Good Samaritans: How GitHub Projects Respond to Increased Attention

Collaborative crowdsourcing is a well-established model of work, especially in the case of open source software development. The structure and operation of these virtual and loosely-knit teams differ from traditional organizations. As such, little is known about how their behavior may change in response to an increase in external attention. To understand these dynamics, we analyze millions of actions of thousands of contributors in over 1100 open source software projects that topped the GitHub Trending Projects page and thus experienced a large increase in attention, in comparison to a control group of projects identified through propensity score matching. In carrying out our research, we use the lens of organizational change, which considers the challenges teams face during rapid growth and how they adapt their work routines, organizational structure, and management style. We show that trending results in an explosive growth in the effective team size. However, most newcomers make only shallow and transient contributions. In response, the original team transitions towards administrative roles, responding to requests and reviewing work done by newcomers. Projects evolve towards a more distributed coordination model with newcomers becoming more central, albeit in limited ways. Additionally, teams become more modular with subgroups specializing in different aspects of the project. We discuss broader implications for collaborative crowdsourcing teams that face attention shocks.National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-1617820.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153786/1/Maldeniya et al. 2020.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153786/4/Maldeniya et al. 2020 Published Version.pdfDescription of Maldeniya et al. 2020.pdf : Main ArticleDescription of Maldeniya et al. 2020 Published Version.pdf : Published Versio