Category Archives: Research

Call for Papers: WikiSym 2012

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8th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

August 27-29, 2012 | Linz, Austria

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) is the premier conference on open collaboration and related technologies. In 2012, WikiSym celebrates its 8th year of scholarly, technical and community innovation in Linz, Austria.  We are excited this year to be collocated with Ars Electronica, the premier digital art and science meeting that attracts over 35,000 attendees per year.

Submissions are invited for the following categories:

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Do Engineering Researchers Care About Truth?

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So ICSE, the top software engineering conference, rejected our paper, again. The reviewers were actually quite positive: high-quality work, little or no flaws, interesting. One of the reviewers found the paper’s results surprising, asked for more details, and suggested new research directions. The final conclusion of both reviews, however, was the same: The work has no merit because it only explains the world, it does not improve it.

Our paper provides a high-quality model of a key aspect of programming behavior in open source, basically the modeling behind this earlier empirical paper. As such, it is a descriptive empirical paper. It takes a large amount of data and provides an analytically closed model of the data so that we can explain or predict the future (better). That’s pretty standard operating procedure in most of natural and social sciences.

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Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution

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Abstract: The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this paper, we show that what tool developers think is true about the size of code contributions is different by more than an order of magnitude from reality. We present this reality, called the commit size distribution, for a large sample of open source and selected closed source projects. We suggest that these new empirical insights will help improve software development tools by aligning underlying design assumptions closer with reality.

Reference: Dirk Riehle, Carsten Kolassa, Michel A. Salim. “Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution.” In Proceedings of Software Engineering 2012 (SE ’12). Springer Verlag, 2012.

The paper is available as a PDF file. The survey used in the paper is also available as a PDF file.

Business Risks and Governance of Open Source in Software Products (in German)

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Titel: Geschäftsrisiken und Governance von Open-Source in Softwareprodukten

Zusammenfassung: In fast jedem Softwareprodukt, auch in großer Standardsoftware, sind heute Open-Source-Komponenten enthalten. Die Hersteller dieser Software müssen die Geschäftsrisiken, die mit der Integration von Open-Source-Software in kommerzielle Produkte verbunden sind, verstehen und vernünftig managen. Dieser Artikel zeigt ein Modell verschiedener rechtlicher, technischer und sozialer Risiken auf, die durch unkontrollierten Einsatz von Open-Source-Software entstehen und erläutert ausgewählte Erfolgsmethoden der Open-Source-Governance, die von führenden Firmen angewandt werden. Das Modell ist das Analyseergebnis von fünf mit großen deutschen Softwareherstellern geführten Interviews sowie weiterer Literaturrecherche.

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Call for Papers: OSS 2012

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For your convenience, the OSS 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

THE 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS

Hammamet, Tunisia, 10-13 September 2012

Scope of OSS 2012

Over the past two decades, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has introduced new successful models for creating, distributing, acquiring and using software and software-based services. Inspired by the success of FLOSS, other forms of open initiatives have been gaining momentum. Open source systems (OSS) now extend beyond software to include open access, open documents, open science, open education, open government, open cloud, open hardware, open artworks and museum exhibits, open innovation and more. On the one hand, the openness movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. On the other hand, the movement has introduced new kinds of challenges, especially as different problem domains embrace openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy. OSS can be complex yet widespread and often cross-cultural. Consequently, they require an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

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Call for Papers: ECOOP 2012

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For your convenience, the ECOOP 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

Call for Papers 征稿启事

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) is the premium international conference covering all areas of object technology and related software development technologies. ECOOP 2012 will take place from 11-16 June, 2012 in Beijing, China — only the second time ECOOP has been held outside Europe. ECOOP 2012 embraces a broad range of topics related to object-orientation, including:

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Call for Papers: Software Product Lines (SPLC 2012)

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For your convenience, the SPLC 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

Call for Contributions (SPLC 2012)

We invite the following classes of contributions:

  1. Research papers: (max. 10 pages, 5 for short papers) describe original research contributions (theoretical, conceptual) to the field of software product line engineering. We also call for short research papers, which are intended to report ideas in their early stages. Submission deadline: Feb. 20th, 2012.

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Definition of Write-Only Journal

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I thought it is a common term by now but apparently it is not. Here is my definition of “write-only (research) journal”:

A write-only research journal is a research journal that publishes papers but is never read (hence write/publish-only). Its purpose is twofold: to (a) give a researcher some reputation return on their work by having it pass (some form of) peer review and to (b) make money for publishers.

David Rosenthal explains the economics of write-only journals. Basically, by increasing the mass of their offering through easily produced write-only journals, publishers appear bigger in bundling deals with libraries and can charge more for the access to their overall offering. Rosenthal then goes on to discuss other problems with peer review, the academic system, etc. but these are other topics.

Obviously, “write-only journal” is a derogatory term. Good research should be published in outlets that are read, not just written to. However, with the abundance of research results, I think even write-only journals serve the small purpose of validating the research results and hence the work of the researcher. However, the implication of write-only is that the results are not worth much and hence that validation should not count as much either. Which is why some say these journals should be done away with anyway.

Design and Implementation of the Sweble Wikitext Parser: Unlocking the Structured Data of Wikipedia

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Abstract: The heart of each wiki, including Wikipedia, is its content. Most machine processing starts and ends with this content. At present, such processing is limited, because most wiki engines today cannot provide a complete and precise representation of the wiki’s content. They can only generate HTML. The main reason is the lack of well-defined parsers that can handle the complexity of modern wiki markup. This applies to MediaWiki, the software running Wikipedia, and most other wiki engines. This paper shows why it has been so difficult to develop comprehensive parsers for wiki markup. It presents the design and implementation of a parser for Wikitext, the wiki markup language of MediaWiki. We use parsing expression grammars where most parsers used no grammars or grammars poorly suited to the task. Using this parser it is possible to directly and precisely query the structured data within wikis, including Wikipedia. The parser is available as open source from http://sweble.org.

Keywords: Wiki, Wikipedia, Wiki Parser, Wikitext Parser, Parsing Expression Grammar, PEG, Abstract Syntax Tree, AST, WYSIWYG, Sweble.

Reference: Hannes Dohrn and Dirk Riehle. “Design and Implementation of the Sweble Wikitext Parser: Unlocking the Structured Data of Wikipedia.” In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym 2011). ACM Press, 2011.

The paper is available as a PDF file (preprint).