Open Source Components Research Articles

Managing Your Open Source Supply Chain-Why and How?

More than 90% of software products include open source components, most of which are not directly added by their own developers. Instead, they are an inseparable part of the software supply chains that virtually all companies depend on. This article covers the related risks of ungoverned open source use and provides industry best practices to practitioners.

Data acquisition system for on-line temperature monitoring in power transformers

Abstract This paper presents an original data acquisition and transmission system designed and optimized for on-line temperature monitoring systems in electric power transformers – system is called SPOTEL. The main purpose of this work is to evaluate a cost effective system that is based on open source components and modular hardware layout, supporting the highest reliability and data safety and security requirements, allowing it applications under demanding industrial conditions. A detailed description of the proposed system design is presented, including hardware and software implementations. Finally, its exemplary on-site implementation and simple reliability analysis have been presented. As a result, SPOTEL confirmed its reliability and functionality regarding the on-line temperature monitoring, typically not met in other similar solutions, and it is now being implemented in several hundreds of transformers of the selected population.

An Efficient Data Stream Analytics Model for Real Time Internet of Things (Iot) Applications

Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics is supporting multiple applications. These numerous applications try to gather data from different environments, here the gathered data may be homogeneous or heterogeneous, but most of the data collected from multiple environments were heterogeneous, the task of gathering, processing, storing and the analysis that is being performed on data are still challenging. Providing security to all these things is also a challenging task due to untrusted networks and big data. Big data management in the ever-expanding network may rise several non-trivial concerns on data collection, data-efficient processing, analytics, and security. However, the above said scenarios depends on large scale sensor deployed. Sensors continuously transmit data to clouds for real time use, which can raise the issue of privacy disclosure because IoT devices may gather data including a kind of sensitive private information. In this context, we propose a two-layer system or model for analyzing IoT data, collected from multiple applications. The first layer is mainly used for gathering data from multiple environments and acts as a service-oriented interface to ingest data. The second layer is responsible for storing and analyses data securely. The Proposed solutions are implemented by the use of open source components.

An automated approach to assess the similarity of GitHub repositories

Open source software (OSS) allows developers to study, change, and improve the code free of charge. There are several high-quality software projects which deliver stable and well-documented products. Most OSS forges typically sustain active user and expert communities which in turn provide decent levels of support both with respect to answering user questions as well as to repairing reported software bugs. Code reuse is an intrinsic feature of OSS, and developing a new system by leveraging existing open source components can reduce development effort, and thus it can be beneficial to at least two phases of the software life cycle, i.e., implementation and maintenance. However, to improve software quality, it is essential to develop a system by learning from well-defined, mature projects. In this sense, the ability to find similar projects that facilitate the undergoing development activities is of high importance. In this paper, we address the issue of mining open source software repositories to detect similar projects, which can be eventually reused by developers. We propose CrossSim as a novel approach to model the OSS ecosystem and to compute similarities among software projects. An evaluation on a dataset collected from GitHub shows that our proposed approach outperforms three well-established baselines.

Removing a false sense of (open source) security

Software is at the heart of the ‘digital transformation’ as businesses rapidly transition from traditional legacy-based models to more robust modern digital business processes. The rapid pace of modern software development has allowed businesses to transform the way they run – yielding superior customer experiences, greater efficiencies, faster time to market and better cost optimisation. But there are many application security challenges that need to be understood and addressed. Security instrumentation technology gives developers current, real-time visibility into all open source components across their portfolio, so they know what needs to be secured, says Jeff Williams of Contrast Security.

INTEGRATION OF EDUCATIONAL SUBSYSTEMS IN AN ALL-IN-ONE INFORMATION AND EDUCATION ENVIRONMENT (with open source software)

Creating an information and educational environment of a higher education institution is the process of introducing and setting up a large number of subsystems - educational, scientific, managerial and others. All these parts are largely integrated with each other. They must transfer some data to other subsystems and receive from them. In spite of the large number of works devoted to the research of creation of information and educational environments of higher educational establishments, the majority of them concern only pedagogical and organizational aspects and very few consider the issues of practical implementation with real examples. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the technical capabilities to organizing information and educational environment through the integration of various software components. In doing so, there is a special emphasis on the use of open source elements and integration with popular cloud services. It is a difficult and expensive task to collect all the subsystems required in the educational environment of a higher education institution. The cost of complex solutions from well-known brands is measured in thousands of dollars, and their implementation requires the same integrated approach. For Ukrainian educational institutions, the solution may be to build their own information and educational environment using open source components. In most cases, such programs already have options for integrating with one another based on the same open standards. It is important to know and understand the possibilities of such integration. Its use will allow to create environment for own needs and organizational features of each institution. The possibility of gradually connecting the necessary components will make it easier to go through the process of introduction of information and educational environment and involvement of all departments of higher education in it. The examples and links in the article demonstrate the potential of open source software as an integral part of the educational environment.

A Novel Web Application for Rapidly Searching the Diagnostic Case Archive

Academic pathologists must have the ability to search their institution's archive of diagnostic case data. This ability is foundational for research, education, and other academic activities. However, the built-in search functions of commercial laboratory information systems are not always optimized for this activity, leading to delays between an initial search request, and eventual results delivery. To solve this problem, a novel web-based search platform was developed, named Pathtools, which allows our staff and trainees to directly and rapidly search our diagnostic case archive. Pathtools was built with open-source components and features a web-based user-interface. Pathtools uses an SQL database which was populated with anatomic pathology case data going back to 1980, and contains 4.2 million cases (as of July 31, 2020). Pathtools has two major modes of operation, “Preview Mode” and “Research Mode.” Since deployment in February of 2019, Pathtools carried out 33,817 searches in Preview Mode, averaging 0.72 s (standard deviation = 1.7) between search submission, and on-screen display of search results. In Research Mode, Pathtools has also been used to produce data sets for research activity, providing the data used in many abstracts and manuscripts our investigators submitted recently. Interestingly, 75% of search activity is from trainees during their preview time. In a survey of residents and fellows, 83% used Pathtools during the majority of their preview sessions, demonstrating an important role for this resource in trainee education. In conclusion, a web-based search tool can rapidly and securely provide search capability directly to end-users, which has augmented trainee education and research activity in our department.

Current Issues in Software Re-Usability: A Critical Review of the Methodological & Legal Issues

The main objective of this research is to discuss the current legal and methodological issues in the field of software Re-Usability. Though there are enormous online forums discussing such issues via Q&A but this paper is an attempt to raise the awareness about the legal issues, which a software engineer may trap into. The paper discussed the current issues with software reusability within the legal and methodological context. This paper applied an extensive literature review to critically appraise the past studies to come to a collective conclusion. Prior to discussing the issues, the benefits of reuse were mentioned, including the saving of time and cost for users. But legally the reuse of software assets creates complexities for the user in relation to meeting all the licensing requirements and dealing with the liability in case of a breach. Methodologically, there are major barriers to reused software when it comes to technical competence and managerial issues such as a lack of resources. Even when reusing software to save time, and leverage off the specialization of other authors, the end-user must also have the technical expertise to search, adapt and merge these reusable assets into the larger software infrastructure. The review ultimately shows the high barriers still remain to software reuse which could mean that smaller developers and businesses will still be reluctant to fully utilize open-source components to the best advantage.

Concurrent asynchronous robotic subsumption using actors & promises

Fascinated with robotics open source integrated component MARIE [1], ROS [5] and open source component PLAYER/STAGE [2], CARMEN [3] available in the eld of robotics application. We aim at developing an asynchronous concurrent robotics application based on subsumption [6] architecture using PLAYER, STAGE and already available services freely available on the internet. We used wanderer and wall follower services embedded inside an actor [10][11] and integrated these services to two dierent robots of same congurations on our promise based frame-work that provides actor as service. The two robots switch their services based on color detected (red,green,blue) during their movement in an environment asynchronously. Using actor as a service lls the gap of SOA [4] & EDA [7] by providing<br />synchronous and asynchronous support for communication. We measured the performance of time taken in completion of services in promise [8] based implementation ,synchronous and asynchronous callback [9] based implementation. We developed a model to prove deadlock freeness in our integrated architecture using petrinet [15] interface composition. We have also been able to justify that component integrated on promise based framework takes less time in service completion than synchronous and asynchronous callback based services.

How to Select Open Source Components

With millions of open source projects available on forges such as GitHub, it may be difficult to select those that best match your requirements. Examining each project's product and development process can help you confidently select the open source projects required for your work.

A robotic irrigation system for urban gardening and agriculture

Water supply limits and continued population growth have intensified the search for measures to conserve water in urban gardening and agriculture. The efficiency of water use is depended on performance of the irrigation technologies and management practices. In this study, a robotic irrigation system was developed that consists of a moving bridge manipulator and a sensor-based platform. The manipulator constructed is partly using open-source components and software, and is easily reconfigurable and extendable. In combination to the sensor-based platform this custommade manipulator has the potential to monitor the soil water content (SWC) in real time. The irrigation robotic system was tested in an experimental soil tank. The total surface of the soil tank was divided by a raster into 18 equal quadrants. The water management for maintaining water content in the soil tank within tolerable lower limit (refill point) was based on three irrigation treatments: i) quadrants whose SWC is below the refill point are irrigated; ii) quadrants are irrigated only when the daily mean SWC of the tank is below the refill point and only for those whose actual SWC is lower than that limit; and iii) quadrants are irrigated every two days with constant amount of water. A comparison of the results of the three irrigation treatments showed that the second treatment gave less irrigation events and less applied water. Finally, we could conclude that the performance of the fabricated robotic system is appropriate and it could play an important role in achieving sustainable irrigation into urban food systems.

Critical Factors for Open Source Advancement in the U.S. Department of Defense

Leveraging open source components in Department of Defense (DoD) software systems remains challenging and is often met with resistance. This article describes several factors that will increase the likelihood of successfully deploying open source in DoD projects.

Technical Note: Ontology-guided radiomics analysis workflow (O-RAW).

PurposeRadiomics is the process to automate tumor feature extraction from medical images. This has shown potential for quantifying the tumor phenotype and predicting treatment response. The three major challenges of radiomics research and clinical adoption are: (a) lack of standardized methodology for radiomics analyses, (b) lack of a universal lexicon to denote features that are semantically equivalent, and (c) lists of feature values alone do not sufficiently capture the details of feature extraction that might nonetheless strongly affect feature values (e.g. image normalization or interpolation parameters). These barriers hamper multicenter validation studies applying subtly different imaging protocols, preprocessing steps and radiomics software. We propose an open‐source ontology‐guided radiomics analysis workflow (O‐RAW) to address the above challenges in the following manner: (a) distributing a free and open‐source software package for radiomics analysis, (b) deploying a standard lexicon to uniquely describe features in common usage and (c) provide methods to publish radiomic features as a semantically interoperable data graph object complying to FAIR (findable accessible interoperable reusable) data principles.MethodsO‐RAW was developed in Python, and has three major modules using open‐source component libraries (PyRadiomics Extension and PyRadiomics). First, PyRadiomics Extension takes standard DICOM‐RT (Radiotherapy) input objects (i.e. a DICOM series and an RTSTRUCT file) and parses them as arrays of voxel intensities and a binary mask corresponding to a volume of interest (VOI). Next, these arrays are passed into PyRadiomics, which performs the feature extraction procedure and returns a Python dictionary object. Lastly, PyRadiomics Extension parses this dictionary as a W3C‐compliant Semantic Web “triple store” (i.e., list of subject‐predicate‐object statements) with relevant semantic meta‐labels drawn from the radiation oncology ontology and radiomics ontology. The output can be published on an SPARQL endpoint, and can be remotely examined via SPARQL queries or to a comma separated file for further analysis.ResultsWe showed that O‐RAW executed efficiently on four datasets with different modalities, RIDER (CT), MMD (CT), CROSS (PET) and THUNDER (MR). The test was performed on an HP laptop running Windows 7 operating system and 8GB RAM on which we noted execution time including DICOM images and associated RTSTRUCT matching, binary mask conversion of a single VOI, batch‐processing of feature extraction (105 basic features in PyRadiomics), and the conversion to an resource description framework (RDF) object. The results were (RIDER) 407.3, (MMD) 123.5, (CROSS) 513.2 and (THUNDER) 128.9 s for a single VOI. In addition, we demonstrated a use case, taking images from a public repository and publishing the radiomics results as FAIR data in this study on http://www.radiomics.org. Finally, we provided a practical instance to show how a user could query radiomic features and track the calculation details based on the RDF graph object created by O‐RAW via a simple SPARQL query.ConclusionsWe implemented O‐RAW for FAIR radiomics analysis, and successfully published radiomic features from DICOM‐RT objects as semantic web triples. Its practicability and flexibility can greatly increase the development of radiomics research and ease transfer to clinical practice.

The XENON1T data acquisition system

The XENON1T liquid xenon time projection chamber is the most sensitive detector built to date for the measurement of direct interactions of weakly interacting massive particles with normal matter. The data acquisition system (DAQ) is constructed from commercial, open source, and custom components to digitize signals from the detector and store them for later analysis. The system achieves an extremely low signal threshold by triggering each channel independently, achieving a single photoelectron acceptance of (93 ± 3)%, and deferring the global trigger to a later, software stage. The event identification is based on MongoDB database queries and has over 98% efficiency at recognizing interactions at the analysis threshold in the center of the target. A readout bandwidth over 300 MB/s is reached in calibration modes and is further expandable via parallelization. This DAQ system was successfully used during three years of operation of XENON1T.

Field-Based High-Throughput Phenotyping for Maize Plant Using 3D LiDAR Point Cloud Generated With a "Phenomobile".

With the rapid rising of global population, the demand for improving breeding techniques to greatly increase the worldwide crop production has become more and more urgent. Most researchers believe that the key to new breeding techniques lies in genetic improvement of crops, which leads to a large quantity of phenotyping spots. Unfortunately, current phenotyping solutions are not powerful enough to handle so many spots with satisfying speed and accuracy. As a result, high-throughput phenotyping is drawing more and more attention. In this paper, we propose a new field-based sensing solution to high-throughput phenotyping. We mount a LiDAR (Velodyne HDL64-S3) on a mobile robot, making the robot a “phenomobile.” We develop software for data collection and analysis under Robotic Operating System using open source components and algorithm libraries. Different from conducting phenotyping observations with an in-row and one-by-one manner, our new solution allows the robot to move around the parcel to collect data. Thus, the 3D and 360° view laser scanner can collect phenotyping data for a large plant group at the same time, instead of one by one. Furthermore, no touching interference from the robot would be imposed onto the crops. We conduct experiments for maize plant on two parcels. We implement point cloud merging with landmarks and Iterative Closest Points to cut down the time consumption. We then recognize and compute the morphological phenotyping parameters (row spacing and plant height) of maize plant using depth-band histograms and horizontal point density. We analyze the cloud registration and merging performances, the row spacing detection accuracy, and the single plant height computation accuracy. Experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed solution.

Risky open source

An annual audit of 1,200 commercial applications libraries has found that nearly all of them (96%) incorporate open source components, and that two-fifths (38%) use components with no identifiable license, putting organisations at risk.

Software Reuse in the Era of Opportunistic Design

Opportunistic design, an approach in which people develop new software systems by routinely reusing and combining components that were not designed to be used together, has become very popular. This emergent pattern places focus on largescale reuse and developer convenience with the developers trawling for most suitable open source components and modules online. The availability of open source assets for almost all imaginable domains has led to software systems in which the visible application code, as written by the application developers themselves, forms only the tip of the iceberg, compared to the reused bulk that remains mostly unknown to the developers. The actual reuse takes place in an ad hoc, mix-and-match fashion. In this article, we take a look at this increasingly popular approach in light of our industry experiences. We argue that challenges associated with such a development model are quite different from traditional software development and reuse.

BlueArch–An Implementation of 5G Testbed

In this paper, we’ve proposed BlueArch, a testbed for 5G research and experimentations. It is a customized setup, that comprises of several opensource components. It provides a platform to create and customize virtual network infrastructures and benchmarks prototypes. BlueArch provides high flexibility in terms of customization, configuration, and programmability. It supports 5G features such as softwarisation, virtualization, and orchestration etc. Furthermore, it offers use cases like IoT, MEC, and SDN through various modes such as simulation, emulation, access to physical network and interfacing with other testbeds. The goal of this paper is to present the structural and functional building blocks of BlueArch, along with their organization and implementation. Finally, three uses cases are also given with results, to demonstrate the functionalities. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in the journal of communication following peer review. The version of record will be available online at: https://academic.oup.com/joc/issue

Theoretical Study of Phonon Dispersion of Lanthanum Aluminate in Terahertz Frequency

The phonon dispersion spectrum, eigenvector and lattice vibration frequency of cubic crystalline lanthanum aluminate (LaAlO3) are studied by density functional theory (DFT). The effects of lattice constant, K-point selection and kinetic-energy cutoff (Ecut) on the calculation accuracy are discussed. The vertical parallel relationship between the phonon propagating wave vector and the atomic vibration direction is analyzed to obtain the frequency of the LaAlO3 transverse (TO)/longitudinal (LO) optical phonon. The comparison results of the first-principles calculation software Materials Studio, the open source component package ABINIT, and he open source component package Quantum Espresso show that the calculation accuracy depends on the convergence analysis and the approximation method adopted in the calculation process.

Building Hierarchical Component Directories.

Component-based development is the software paradigm focused on building applications using reusable software components. Applica- tions are built by assembling components, where the required interfaces of a component are connected to compatible provided interfaces of other components. In order to have an effective building process, software ar- chitects need adequate component directories that both index available components and ease their search. So far, existing approaches provide only a limited structure and indexation to store/register components and, as a consequence, they propose an inadequate searching process. Even when the indexes are built as flat or hierarchical structures, the indexed elements are not the components themselves, but part of them, such as services or functions, making the search of the needed compatible com- ponents imprecise. To cope with searching and compatibility problems, the contribution of this paper is twofold: it is composed of both a refined methodology (improving a previous approach) and a tool to build a hi- erarchically structured component directory. The component directory solves the identified problems letting an architect find components that are compatible with a given specification (to be assembled) or components that can substitute to a given one. This directory uses Formal Concept Analysis to build component type hierarchies thanks to a three step classification process that successively classifies functionality signatures, interfaces and, at last, component types. The refinement of the methodology is based on a substitutability relationship between components, where the notion of not having a parameter or an interface of some type makes our methodology more robust when considering required interfaces. The tool made possible to overcome scalability issues implementing several variations on the clas- sification strategy. We present several experiments on three case studies to classify components from on-line open-source component repositories as a validation of our methodology.