Version Aware LibreOffice Documents

Version control systems provide a methodology for maintaining changes in a document over its lifetime and provide better management and control with evolving document collections, such as source code for large software systems. However, no version control system currently supports such functionality for the office documents. An office document can go through different modifications during its lifetime and can be developed by multiple technical or non-technical users. It might be desirable to know how the document came to its final stage and to sometime retrieve older versions of the document or merge two different versions of a document without manual effort. This thesis work explains how we could implement versioning support for LibreOffice documents without using additional infrastructure for version repositories. Since embedding versioning data within the office document can indeed make version control a seamless part of the writing process. Such a modified document with embedded versioning data is called a version aware document. A versioning framework has been developed previously at UWM that provides this versioning functionality for version aware XML documents by calculating the reverse deltas between revisions. A Version Aware XML document integrates full versioning functionality into an XML document type, using XML namespaces to avoid document type errors. Version aware XML documents contain a preamble with versions stored in reverse delta format, plus unique ID attributes attached to the nodes of the documents. They support the full branching and merging functionalities familiar to software engineers, in contrast to the constrained versioning models typical of Office applications. LibreOffice is a free open source office suite that is widely used for document creation and branched off from OpenOffice in 2010. It is managed by The Document Foundation and includes application for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and database. Each document is represented in the Open Office Document Format (ODF), which is a collection of XML files. The current project is an endeavor to show the practicality of the version aware XML documents approach by modifying the LibreOffice document suite to support version awareness. It is necessary to understand the architecture of LibreOffice application as well as the document load and save cycles, the XML element and attribute processing, the class hierarchies and the internal data structures. We have modified the source code of the LibreOffice Writer application to accept and preserve the required changes

Consider the Source: The Value of Source Code to Digital Preservation Strategies

One of the major challenges in the digital preservation field is the difficulty of ensuring long-term access to digital objects, especially in cases when the software that was used to create an object is no longer current. Software source code has a human-readable, documentary structure that makes it an overlooked aspect of digital preservation strategies, in addition to a valuable component for the records of modern computing history. The author surveys several approaches to software preservation and finds that, by supporting open source initiatives, digital libraries can improve their ability to preserve access to their collections for future generations

Visualization of InsightNotes Database Annotation Management System

InsightNotes is an annotation management system designed for scientific databases. It addresses the increasing scale of annotations that occur within systems such as biological databases, where the number of annotations can be 10s or even 100s of times greater than the number of records that are stored. The solution that InsightNotes provides is to create concise representations, or summaries, of the annotations in order to produce more meaningful data. However, there is currently no visualization for InsightNotes. What we provide is a visualization for the functionality of InsightNotes, making it easier to manipulate and retrieve the data along with the annotations

Linux for Academics, Part II: The Advantages of Free and Open-Source Software

The article discusses the Linux free and open-source operating system and methods for installing software within it, including office and statistical software

Factors that Facilitate or Impede the Effective Implementation of Open Source Software to Support Learning and Teaching in a New Zealand Senior High School

This study’s main focus was on critical success factors in the implementation of open source software to support learning and teaching in a senior high school. Research questions involved the nature of open source software, rationales for its use in the school, its advantages and disadvantages in education, and the pedagogy used in classrooms by teachers in relation to open source software. This study contributes to knowledge about the use of OSS in education

ELFI

Engine for Likelihood-Free Inference (ELFI) is a Python software library for performing likelihood-free inference (LFI). ELFI provides a convenient syntax for arranging components in LFI, such as priors, simulators, summaries or distances, to a network called ELFI graph. The components can be implemented in a wide variety of languages. The stand-alone ELFI graph can be used with any of the available inference methods without modifications. A central method implemented in ELFI is Bayesian Optimization for Likelihood-Free Inference (BOLFI), which has recently been shown to accelerate likelihood-free inference up to several orders of magnitude by surrogate-modelling the distance. ELFI also has an inbuilt support for output data storing for reuse and analysis, and supports parallelization of computation from multiple cores up to a cluster environment. ELFI is designed to be extensible and provides interfaces for widening its functionality. This makes the adding of new inference methods to ELFI straightforward andautomatically compatible with the inbuilt features.Peer reviewe

Improving Version-Aware Word Documents

Coakley~\textit{et al.} described how they developed Version Aware Word Documents, which is an enhanced document representation that includes a detailed version history that is self-contained and portable. However, they were not able to adopt the unique-ID-based techniques that have been shown to support efficient merging and differencing algorithms. This thesis describes how it is possible to adapt existing features of MS Word\u27s OOXML representation to provide a system of unique element IDs suitable for those algorithms. This requires taking over Word\u27s Revision Save ID (RSID) system and also defining procedures for specifying ID values for elements that do not support the RSID mechanism. In addition, we provide an updated version of the MS plug-in developed by Coakley~\textit{et al.}. Important limitations remain but appear surmountable