Proposals för student projects
Proposals 1 & 2: Open Document formats & Interoperability
Long-term preservation of digital information is an issue of increasing importance for many organisations. Preservation of documents over very long life-cycles imposes a number of challenges for an organisation. Open standards are seen as a key enabler by which an organisation can reduce risk for becoming dependent on specific vendors and systems. For an organisation it is critical to have a strategy for avoiding different kinds of lock-in effects, and open document formats are generally seen as a way by which organisations can reduce the risk of becoming dependent on specific vendors and systems. As an organisation's documents (and information) often outlive the systems by which the documents were generated, it is cruccal that these documents can be maintained independently from the systems from which they were generated.
Today, there is a growing awareness amongst organisations concerning problems related to lock-in effects. However, many organisations struggle with the many potential solutions. One important aspect of this concerns open document formats. Today, many organisations have limited awareness concerning how open document formats can aid in developing a sustainable strategy for dealing with these problems.
We propose a number of student projects in the area of open document formats that aim to propose and investigate solutions to these problems. Projects can usefully be undertaken in collaboration with ongoing research projects at the University of Skövde. The Software Systems Research Group is currently working with a number of companies and public sector organisations: these may constitute suitable case study contexts. Students undertaking these projects may also be invited to participate in specific project meetings with researchers and stakeholders from these external organisations.
Specifically, we propose the following student projects:
Proposal 1) ODF is a specific open document format that is gaining increasing interest amongst public and private sector organisations. In this project the aim is to investigate possible migration strategies for unlocking documents from proprietary (.doc) to open (ODF) document formats. There are a number of open source projects that can be investigated and the goal is to propose and demonstrate a strategy that can work in an organisation that wishes to utilize open document formats. The study could focus on technical (or socio-technical) aspects of such
a strategy, and the project should demonstrate its feasibility through conducting a case study.
Proposal 2) In order to minimize risk and aid interoperability between systems, it is important that documents can be maintained independent of the tools that were used to generate them. In this project the aim is to undertake a systematic review of specific proposals for interoperability between open document formats in order to propose a basis for a sustainable approach for an organisation that wishes to become
independent of any specific tools. The study should include a systematic review of the precise interoperability problems existing, and how these may be ameliorated. The project should utilize 'real' data and ideally be undertaken in collaboration with an organisation and conducted as a case study.
These proposals will be undertaken in collaboration with the OSA project. For more information, please contact Björn Lundell (or any other member of the OSA project research team).
Proposal 3: Visualizing Proview
Proview is a process control system originally developed for steel plate factory. It contains all functions normally required for successful sequential control, adjustment, data acquisition, communication, supervision, or similar. Furthermore, Proview is probably the first Open Source system in this area. Originally, it was developed in Sweden by Mandator and SSAB Oxelösund as a process control system based on standard PCs. Today, the system is a fully-fledged, integrated and low- cost solution that is running on standard PCs with Linux as operating system.
Since Proview's development started 20 years ago, it has grown into a large software system. The packed sources including documentation weight over 100 MB. Due to its size and organic growth, it is hard to get an overlook over the system. This complexity and the resulting effort to get an initial system installed and configured is seen as an inhibitors in adopting the software.
In this project, your task is to analyze this software using know software analysis techniques. This includes the application of software metric analysis and visualization of components and program flow e.g. using UML diagrams.
The idea with this project is three-fold: First, by analyzing the software practical knowledge (e.g. how to get started) can be collect and added to Proview's documentation. Second, the software analysis can detect components which have an inferior quality. This information is expected to be fed back to the developers to improve the project. Third, the diagrams will help other adopters of this software to get a better understanding and thus lower the barriers.
Contact person for this project is Thomas Fischer.