FP7: Capacities
Summary
OSSLab aims to provide a laboratory where researchers will be able to run large-scale studies on the source code of thousands of real-world software systems and the data of the processes used to build them. Many important results in software engineering have come from empirical studies. Yet the difficulty of setting up realistic experiments often results in studies of a small number of high-profile systems or toy-problems programmed by students. This need not be so. The open source software movement has provided us with a goldmine of thousands of software systems whose code and process data are freely available. Studying these systems is easy in theory, but difficult in practice, as their data is scattered around in various repositories, formats, databases, and applications. Based on work performed in the highly-successful IST project Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS) we propose to gather code and process data in an open virtual laboratory, OSSLab. Researchers will be able to use OSSLab by uploading their programs related to the studies they want to perform, execute them on the laboratory’s huge data assets, and download and share the corresponding results. OSSLab will serve not only the software engineering community, but also the increasing number of researchers from other disciplines, like sociology, economics, management science, and psychology, who utilize in their studies empirical data from open source software projects.
The main tasks associated with setting up OSSLab include the gathering and normalization of the data, the creation of an infrastructure that will allow researchers to run their code while taking into account fair resource allocation and security, facilities for sharing the data and building on each others results, and pilot studies demonstrating the utility of OSSLab to a wide scientific community.
TODO
- Write to Pires
- Gather partners
- Korfiatis? Constantiou?
- Get LoS from IDABC
- Write proposal
Call information
- FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2008-2: Call documents
- Information Event on the fourth Call for proposals under the e-Infrastructures Activity of the 'Capacities' Specific Programme, FP7
- Networking Sessions of the FP7 'Capacities' Information Events
- Contact person: Carlos Morais Pires
