SerenA Contributions to Open Source Software

One of the enjoyable aspects of writing research software, is that often a free license is granted to play with and explore a vast variety of technologies, frameworks and programming libraries.

The technologies that are engaged with the SerenA development have been described by others in blog postings previously on this website. We have incorporated a sensible combination of technologies, primarily focused around the semantic web, multi-agent systems, and realtime notifications on smart phones.

For evangelists of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), the ambition is to contribute to such software communities and projects. Be that through publicity, bug reports, artistic branding or source code. Two of the developers on the project – Jamie Forth and myself, are particularly fond of FOSS engagement, and alongside SerenA development have been contributing source code to a number of projects.

Jamie’s recent work on a fork [1] of the jWebSockets framework is perhaps the most telling contribution thus far. This framework facilitates realtime notification delivery between the SerenA backend and the SerenA Android app.

As a side effect of working with linked open data, we’ve developed a comfortable level of familiarity with a collection of semantic web toolkits. For a recent SerenA workshop on linked open data (blog post), a web based RDF authoring utility was developed [2]. Alongside SerenA development, I maintain the ‘rdf4h’ [3] and ‘hsparql’ [4] semantic web libraries for Haskell. I have used these myself in other projects such as ‘dblp2bibtex’ [4], used for bibtex creation for computer science authors; and at hackathons such as the recent Culture Hack Scotland event, semanticizing events in The List magazine [5].

The success criteria in post-mortem’s of research projects may be cloudy and convoluted. But active engagement with open source software projects is an incontrovertible measurement of legacy a project leaves behind. The SerenA project has supported our efforts in FOSS collaboration, and whatever else materializes of our primary ambitions for SerenA (watch this space), we are hopeful that these open sourced projects live on and are used by many other development teams – in academia or otherwise.

[1] – https://github.com/jamieforth/jwebsocket-core
[2] – https://github.com/robstewart57/discover-me-semantically
[3] – https://github.com/robstewart57/rdf4h
[4] – https://github.com/robstewart57/hsparql
[5] – https://github.com/robstewart57/thelistdata-chscot

–
Rob Stewart
@robstewartUK