Sharing, Open Data and Open Access/Content

• How Open-Source Product Information Management is Bringing SMBs On a Level Playing Field with Big Tech Firms?

  As detailed above, open-source PIM systems are an absolute blessing for SMBs looking to move toward an Omnichannel customer engagement strategy. This is especially true for organizations that have strong IT teams or partners because successfully customizing and implementing open source software often requires specialized IT knowledge. Luckily, even if you don’t have the right skill sets on hand, you can simply outsource the implementation to the PIM system provider or a third party IT services firm. At the same time, you may also consider nurturing software development talent in-house to achieve the best results at optimal costs.

• Cooperatives Europe builds open-source index for the co-op movement

• Intellegens and Optibrium announce success in the Open Source Malaria global initiative

  Intellegens, an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, and, Optibrium™, leading providers of software and services for drug discovery, today announced joint success in the Open Source Malaria (OSM) global initiative aimed at identifying the best predictive models for antimalarial compounds. Together, the companies developed one of the top models, deploying a cutting-edge deep neural network algorithm, Alchemite™, to accurately predict active compounds with novel mechanisms of actions that could be critical to future malaria control and elimination. As one of four prizewinning models selected, the project will now progress through the next phase of the initiative that includes the proposal of new compounds that are predicted to be active, for synthesis and testing against the malaria parasite.

• These Reporters Rely on Public Data, Rather Than Secret Sources

  Leaked documents and interviews with whistle-blowing sources will always be a part of investigative journalism. But thanks to the rise of digital technology, and the easy availability of data that has gone with it, reporters have more ways to get stories than ever before. “You can be on your couch in front of your computer and solve a mystery of a missile system downing a plane,” said Aliaume Leroy, a journalist who is part of the BBC’s Africa Eye team.

• News Organizations are Engaging More Proactively in Open-Source Journalism to Rebuild Trust in News Media

  As news media skepticism grows worldwide and digital tools become increasingly robust and available, reporters and news organizations are engaging more proactively in open-source journalism—a practice in which reporters investigate and construct stories based on publicly available data, including via social media, per The New York Times.

• India’s first open source integrated geospatial data observatory launched

  India Observatory, country’s first socio, economic, ecological open source integrated Geospatial data platform, was launched on Tuesday at Hyderabad in GeoSmart India conference. 

• SFU global collaboration creates world’s first open-source database of natural microbial products

  Surprisingly, despite our extensive knowledge of the chemical compounds found in nature, there has never been a comprehensive, open-source database for researchers to store information on the chemistry produced by bacteria and fungi. Until now. Simon Fraser University associate professor Roger Linington and a team of international collaborators have created the Natural Products Atlas, which holds information on nearly 25,000 natural compounds and serves as a knowledge base and repository for the global scientific community.

• Promoting success: Music professor involved in Open Educational Resources

• Open Source Emoji System: OpenMoji

  With the widespread use of smartphones, the use of emojis has increased to a new level. The new open source emoji system OpenMoji has been released with a collection of 3,180 characters to improve this language. If you’re looking for an open-source, good-looking emoji set, OpenMoji with 3,180 emojis is just for you. According to OpenMoji’s website, OpenMoji is the first open source and standalone emoji system. The project involved more than 50 students and two professors from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd University in Germany. All emojis are approved and licensed Creative Commons.

• Meet OpenMoji, a Free and Open Source Emoji Set

  According to OpenMoji’s website, the project is the first open-source and independent emoji system. The project is the team-effort of over 50 students and 2 professors at the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd (Design University). All the emojis are approved and are available with a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International) license.

OSS Leftovers

• SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: GraalWasm

  GraalWasm is a WebAssembly engine implemented in GraalVM. It can run WebAssembly programs in the binary format, generated with compiler backends such as Emscripten. “Supporting WebAssembly expands the set of languages GraalVM can execute with a whole other set of languages to the ones supported by GraalVM and further step towards making it a universal platform for programming language execution,” the developers behind the project wrote in a blog post.

• Scientists Created Open Source Tools to See in Animal Vision

  Given that every animal species sees colors, patterns, and brightness differently due to their unique eye adaptations, there are countless modes of vision that humans have never experienced. That’s why scientists have developed free, open-source software that can be run on photos taken with an average smartphone to simulate the perspective of animals. The platform is described in a paper published on Tuesday in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Called the Quantitative Colour Pattern Analysis (QCPA) framework, the platform enables people to customize digital photos to match properties associated with animal visual systems.

• This open-source tool ‘Doccano’ provides annotation features for text classification

  Doccano is an open-source text annotation tool for machine learning professionals. It sets annotation features for sequence labeling, text classification and sequence to sequence tasks. It has multiple applications like creating labeled data for sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization and so on.

• When – and When Not – to Use Open Source Apache Cassandra, Kafka, Spark and Elasticsearch

• Doubts Surface in Open Source Survey

• Open Source Still Rolling, But Roadblocks Loom

• Can open source software be gender-biased? Yes, say NAU professors who are working to eliminate gender-biased ‘bugs’ [Ed: This is not a FOSS thing; equally applicable to nonfree software, but that doesn't seem to matter when gender issues are leveraged in a partisan fashion]

  The cycle of open source software (OSS) development and gender representation is, perhaps, unsurprising—women are vastly underrepresented among OSS developers. As a result, women miss out on development and professional opportunities, and as jobs in OSS development open up, women lack the experience to get them. And the cycle continues. It’s so pervasive that it’s likely built right into the software itself, say four researchers, which is an entirely separate problem—one they’re aiming to resolve through finding these bugs and proposing redesigns around them, leading to more gender-inclusive tools used by software developers.

• Can an open source virtual assistant take on Alexa?

  Based on the data collected and patterns determined (such as purchasing a specific orange juice in every grocery order), virtual assistants can identify our preferences and help their vendors build a profile of ourselves, and users collectively. From one perspective, this could lead to the development of personalized customer experiences as a result, on the other, it can raise concerns over the privacy of a system consumers trust to put in their own home and uncertainty around what the end uses are for the data it collects. [...] The virtual assistant is also embedded with Genie, a deep learning model that trains Almond to understand more complex commands across more domains. Presently, Almond has achieved an accuracy of 68 percent of the user’s input and the continuous training of Almond would allow the virtual assistant to acquire more skills, on par with today’s commercialized virtual assistants.

• 3 Ways Open Source is Accelerating Geoint for Defense Missions [Ed: Free software leveraged by militarism too (white-washed as "defence")]

  That’s why open-source software development has quickly become indispensable to defense missions. With open-source maps and search engines, users can drop layers from unique indices into a single dashboard and filter across them in real time to search for all kinds of location data—from geopoints (like longitude and latitude) to geoshapes (like polygons, circles and lines)—enabling speedier analyses that scale through dynamic visualizations. Now, defense analysts can query geodata faster than ever before, resulting in improved situational awareness, monitoring, tracking and spatial analysis capabilities essential to the missions of our troops.

• Benefits and importance of open source technology for enterprises

  Technology should be carefully selected to actively grow business over the long term, so it requires careful consideration and foresight. Open source has been gaining popularity or a long time due to the benefits it comes with. Those who don’t know the difference between the two, open source software’s source code is available to everyone. Anyone can modify its code while proprietary software is owned by enterprises or individuals and its source code can only be modified by its owners. Enterprises that use open source software enjoy many advantages over those using proprietary software. These are enumerated below. [...] Compared to proprietary software, open-source software is inexpensive. In an enterprise environment, it is more affordable than proprietary software of similar capabilities. Furthermore, in enterprise environments, the capabilities of open source software often exceed those of proprietary software. Using such software also makes sense for enterprises because as they scale the software scales with them. Because fledgling enterprises have modest budgets such software is ideal for them.

• TIBCO Adds Support for Apache Pulsar to Messaging Solution

  TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration, API management, and analytics, announced its plans to add Apache Pulsar as a fully supported component in TIBCO® Messaging. Continuing its commitment to open source technologies, this addition will ensure that users of the highly popular Apache pub-sub messaging system can now leverage TIBCO Messaging to create a single, fully integrated application integration infrastructure, giving developers the freedom to choose the right messaging tool for the job at hand.

• Tibco dials into Apache Pulsar

  Software integration and analytics company Tibco has added Apache Pulsar as a fully supported component in its own messaging brand, TIBCO Messaging. By way of definition and clarification then… Apache Pulsar is a distributed ‘pub-sub’ messaging platform with a flexible messaging model and an intuitive client API.

Drupal in Canada and in farmOS

• Revitalizing the Canadian government’s online presence

  Many government branches rely on proprietary software to power their websites and digital services. Using licensed technology can leave users locked in to costly and outdated platforms that are not easily updated, says Chris Smith, the CEO of Ottawa digital agency OPIN Software. Several government organizations have teamed up with OPIN over the past year to make the switch to Drupal, providing a more streamlined and functional experience for Canadians and giving government IT managers more flexibility.

• Open Source Technology Could Be a Boon to Farmers

  Chang, who started farming eight years ago and works full-time in information technology off-farm, searched for a different solution for his 14-acre organic vegetable and cut flower farm in northeastern Connecticut, finding software aimed at CSAs, which he doesn’t run, or marketing and sales, which he didn’t need. Then he discovered farmOS, a free, open source record-keeping software built on the web platform Drupal.

• Open source technology could be a boon to farmers

  Robert Chang’s fellow small-scale farmers turn to each other when they need low-cost tech to stay organized as they plant dozens of varieties of vegetables each season and seek to consistently fill their community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes each week. [...] In the case of farmOS, on the other hand, Chang says, “Nobody is mining it or monetizing it in any way. It’s yours. You can export it in whatever way you want.” And it is infinitely customizable, if you’re tech savvy. “Since it’s open source, you can change the code, if you want to do your own customizations.”