Author Archive for Stuart Yeates

Building Communities in Computational Science

Published by Stuart Yeates on December 20, 2007 in Development and Community. 1 Comment

Building Communities in Computational Science
An OSS Watch / CCPForge Community Day
Friday 11 January 2008
Rutherford Appleton Lab, Oxfordshire

Do you want more people to use your software? Do you want it to interoperate with other pieces of software? Do you want it to be more robust and reliable? Do you want to involve more collaborators in the development of your software?

Come along to the OSS Watch / CCPForge Community Day and see how.

With speakers from OSS Watch, OMII and CCPForge as well as ChemShell and CCP1GUI, the day aims to first tell you how to do it and the help you achieve it in workshop sessions.

Program of the day

10:00-10:30 Arrive and coffee/tea/biscuits. People can set up laptops
10:30-10:40 David Worth (RAL) with an introduction
10:40-11:00 Ross Gardler (OSS Watch) on building community
11:00-11:20 Neil Chue Hong (OMII-UK) on building communities of software users
11:20-11:40 Stuart Yeates (OSS Watch) on tools for community
11:40-12:00 David Worth (RAL) on CCPForge
12:00-12:20 Johannes Kaestner (Daresbury) on ChemShell/DL-FIND
12:20-12:40 Paul Sherwood (Darebury) on CCP1GUI
12:40-13:00 David Worth (RAL) on software engineering/development
lifecycle

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Workshop session 1
15:30 Coffee/tea/biscuits arrive
15:30-16:30 Workshop session 2

The workshops will involve:
* Ross from OSS Watch working with people to develop a plan for build community around their project
* Johannes from the ChemShell project working with people who want to connect their software to the ChemShell software
* Paul from CCP1GUI project on working with people who want to build an interface with CCP1GUI or associated technology
* Neil from OMII-UK on community for the ways the software you’ve built is going to be sustained/supported/extended
* David from CCPForge working with people who want to get their code into a version control system and understanding how to use it going forward
* Stuart from OSS Watch working with people who want to understand or deploy community building tools
* Stuart from OSS Watch or David from Darebury working with people who want understand particulars software engineering technique
* Stuart or Ross from OSS Watch working with people who want licensing advice for software or content.
* Neil from OMII-UK on ways you could benefit from working with OMII

The OSS Watch / CCPForge Community Day is being held on Friday 11 January 2008 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

http://www.scitech.ac.uk/About/Find/RAL/Introduction.aspx

If you interested in coming along, please register with Dr David Worth
<d.j.worth@rl.ac.uk> by Tuesday 8 January 2008.

Changing Licences

Published by Stuart Yeates on November 20, 2007 in Legal and Discussion. 0 Comments

There’s a story in wired about licences in flickr photos. The problem is that flickr requires users to tag each photo with one of a range of licences (including “all rights reserved”). Users can change the licence at will, either on individual photos or on thousands at once.

If a third party takes a creative commons licensed image, reuses it under the terms of the licence and the user subsequently changes the licence on the image on the flickr site, difficulties arise.

The creative commons licences are perpetual, containing words like:
“Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:“

So the third party can continue using the image under the creative commons licence indefinitely, provided they have a local copy. The user (the copyright owner) has now removed their offer of the image under the licence, so proving they are entitled to use the image could be problematic, unless they’ve done their homework and kept some form of log of the licence. Getting a new copy of the image under the old licence if they haven’t kept a copy is likely to be impossible.

I have no idea what happens in the case where an image is pulled dynamically from flickr and built into a composite in a way which breaches the new licence. Presumably such dynamic system need to check the licence every time, as is entirely possible using the flickr API.

The take home message? Keep track of what software and content you’re reusing, keep and archive a local copy of everything you use.

Open access bill in the USA looks likely to pass

Published by Stuart Yeates on November 8, 2007 in Strategy and Policy, Standards and Community. 1 Comment

Open access looks about to pass a significant milestone with a bill in USA Congress which requires open access to National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded outputs. While NIH funded research is only a small fraction of the peer review funded research globally, it’s one of the largest coordinated research programs with huge inertia, both externally and internally. It seems likely that all significant medical and genetics peer review publication forums will be open access in the near future. NIH also funds work in a whole range of disciplines which impact on human health, so they’ll receive an open access boost too.

Such a big win is built on the work of a whole lot of individuals and groups world-wide, including Stevan Harnad (long term open access über-evangelist) and the JISC funded Sherpa, OpenDOAR and ePrints projects. Congratulations guys.

FOAF + OpenID

Published by Stuart Yeates on November 1, 2007 in Discussion, Standards and Community. 1 Comment

FOAF + OpenID is a semantic web attempt to solve the problem of blog spam. The idea is that those people who have FOAF files and OpenID identities can identify each others networks of friends, colleagues and acquaintances using their FOAF files and authenticate the individuals using OpenID.

I’ve found a flaw in this: I could have (and probably should have) a link in my FOAF file to a semantic wiki representation of myself, which is (in the way of wikis) world writeable. Spammers could easily edit the wiki to insert a link from myself to them which would let them become part of the group and spam us.

There are a number of fixes for this:

  • Check the metadata in each FOAF file to ensure that it claims to be written by the subject of the file (which wouldn’t be the case for the wiki). This would require many FOAF/RDF generation tools to be updated.
  • Add trust attributes to external links in FOAF files. This would also require many FOAF/RDF generation tools to be updated.
  • Compile a list of known world-writable RDF sources and use it to black-list them. This would always be playing a game of catch-up and there some sites might slip through.
  • Require trusted users not to link to world-writeable RDF sources (or sources of RDF that harvest from the wider web). This requires that the semantic web workers work in a walled garden and not link outside it into the wider web.

None of these are easy.

Somehow this whole thing reminds me of the OpenPGP web-of-trust, without the cryptographic underpinnings.

Access from Prisons

Published by Stuart Yeates on October 24, 2007 in Discussion, Software and Community. 0 Comments


Beautiful morning by Stuart Yeates
This morning while talking to Niall Sclater (Director of the Open University’s VLE Programme) at moodlemoot about barriers to migrating the last of the Open University’s paper courses to electronic courses via moodle, he pointed me to a great pilot underway in some of the roughest prisons in London.

The POLARIS project trial is rolling out access to educational websites into a number of London prisons, including the Wormwood Scrubs and Bellmarsh. Apparently Bellmarsh with it’s population of very high security inmates is less of a problem than some of the others which have a much higher rates of turnover.

The rolling out of access into such places puts a whole new emphasis on the security of the applications used in educational institutions. It’s worth noting that the OU (for whom prisoners represent a small but significant number of students) has just spent a great deal of time and effort rewriting the roles and security in Moodle.