skip to main content
10.1145/2641580.2641587acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesopencollabConference Proceedingsconference-collections
tutorial
Open access

On influences between software standards and their implementations in open source projects: Experiences from RDFa and its implementation in Drupal

Published: 27 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that standards implemented in open source software can reduce the risk for lock-in, improve interoperability, and promote competition on the market. However, there is limited knowledge concerning the relationship between standards and their implementations in open source software. This paper reports from an investigation of influences between software standards and open source software implementations of software standards. The study focuses on the RDFa standard and its implementation in the Drupal project. Specifically, issues in the W3C issue trackers for RDFa and the Drupal issue tracker for RDFa have been analysed. Findings show that there is clear evidence of reciprocal action between RDFa and its implementation in Drupal. The study contributes novel insights concerning effective processes for development and long-term maintenance of software standards and their implementations in open source projects.

References

[1]
Behlendorf, B. 2009. How Open Source Can Still Save the World. Keynote Presentation, In 5th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2009, Skövde, Sweden, 5 Jun.
[2]
Bizer, C., Eckert, K., Meusel, R., Mühleisen, H., Schuhmacher, M. and Völker, J. 2013. Deployment of RDFa, Microdata, and Microformats on the Web -- A Quantitative Analysis, In Alani, H. et al. (Eds.) The Semantic Web -- ISWC 2013, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 8219, Springer, Berlin, 17--32.
[3]
Brock, A. (2013). Understanding Commercial Agreements With Open Source Companies. In Coughlan, S. (Ed.) Thoughts on Open Innovation - Essays on Open Innovation from leading thinkers in the field, OpenForum Europe LTD for OpenForum Academy, Brussels.
[4]
Corlosquet, S., Cyganiak, R., Polleres, A. and Decker, S. 2009. RDFa in Drupal: Bringing cheese to the web of data. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Scripting and Development for the Semantic Web (SFSW 2009).
[5]
Crowston, K., Kangning, W., Howison, J. and Wiggins, A. 2012. Free/Libre open-source software development: What we know and what we do not know. ACM Computing Surveys 44, 2, Article 7.
[6]
Crowston, K. and Scozzi, B. 2008. Bug Fixing Practices within Free/Libre Open Source Software Development Teams. Journal of Database Management 19, 2, 1--30.
[7]
Drupal.org 2012. Make RDFa markup upward compatible with RDFa 1.1 https://drupal.org/node/1848464, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[8]
Drupal.org 2013. 1 Million Users on Drupal.org! https://drupal.org/node/2110205, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[9]
Drupal.org 2014a. Drupal -- Open Source CMS. http://drupal.org/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[10]
Drupal.org 2014b. List of intergovernmental organisations using Drupal. https://groups.drupal.org/node/79093, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[11]
Drupal.org 2014c. Drupal Core modules. https://drupal.org/node/1283408, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[12]
Drupal.org 2014d. About the Drupal Association. https://association.drupal.org/about, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[13]
Drupal.org 2014e. Drupal Board of Directors. https://association.drupal.org/about/board, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[14]
Drupalshowcase.com 2013. Drupal Showcase -- Industries. http://www.drupalshowcase.com/ site-industries, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[15]
EC 2013. Rolling Plan on ICT Standardisation. European Commision, Enterprise and Industry Directorate General, 5 Dec. 2013.
[16]
Egyedi, T. M. 2007. Standard-compliant, but incompatible?!. Computer Standards & Interfaces 29, 6, 605--613.
[17]
Egyedi, T. M. and Dahanayake, A. 2003. Difficulties implementing standards. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Standardization and Innovation in Information Technology (SIIT 2003), 22--24 Oct., Delft, The Netherlands, 75--84.
[18]
EU 2012. Guidelines for Public Procurement of ICT Goods and Services: SMART 2011/0044, D2 - Overview of Procurement Practices. Final Report, Europe Economics, London, 1 Mar., http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/study-action23/d2-finalreport-29feb2012.pdf
[19]
Europe Economics 2012. Guidelines for Public Procurement of ICT Goods and Services: SMART 2011/0044, D2 - Overview of Procurement Practices, Final Report.
[20]
FRAND 2012. EC Workshop: Implementing FRAND standards in Open Source: mission impossible?. Brussels, Belgium, 22 Nov.
[21]
Friedrich, J. 2011. Making innovation happen: The role of standards and openness in an innovation-friendly ecosystem. In Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Standardization and Innovation in Information Technology (SIIT 2011), 1--8.
[22]
Friedrich, J. 2013. Getting Requirements Right: Towards a nuanced approach on standardisation and IPRs. In Coughlan, S. (Eds.) Thoughts on Open Innovation - Essays on Open Innovation from leading thinkers in the field, OpenForum Europe LTD for OpenForum Academy, ISBN 978-1-304-01551-8, Brussels.
[23]
Gamalielsson, J., Grahn, A. and Lundell, B. 2012. Learning through analysis of coding practices in FLOSS projects. In Robles, G. et al. (Eds.) Proceedings of FLOSSEdu 2012: FLOSS Education - Long-term Sustainability, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, ISBN 978-952-15-2938-2, ISSN 1797-836X, 13--19.
[24]
Gamalielsson, J. and Lundell, B. 2013. Experiences from implementing PDF in open source: challenges and opportunities for standardisation processes, In Jakobs, K. (Ed.) Proceedings of the 8th IEEE Conference on Standardization and Innovation in Information Technology (SIIT 2013), ISBN 3-86130-802-9, IEEE, Piscataway, 39--49.
[25]
Gamalielsson, J., Lundell, B., Grahn, A., Andersson, S., Feist, J., Gustavsson, T. and Strindberg, H. 2013. Towards a reference model on how to utilise Open Standards in Open Source projects: experiences based on Drupal, In Petrinja, E. et al. (Eds.) Open Source Software: Quality Verification, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 404, ISBN 978-3-642-38928-3, Springer, Heidelberg, 257--263.
[26]
Garza, A. 2009. From OPAC to CMS: Drupal as an extensible library platform. Library Hi Tech 27, 2, 252--267.
[27]
Ghosh, R.A. 2005. Open Standards and Interoperability Report: An Economic Basis for Open Standards. FLOSSPOLS, Deliverable D4, 12 Dec.
[28]
Gov.uk 2012. Open Standards in Government IT: A Review of the Evidence. Cabinet Office, UK, 1 Nov.
[29]
Hubble, A., Murphy, D. A., and Perry, S. C. 2011. From Static and Stale to Dynamic and Collaborative: The Drupal Difference. Information Technology and Libraries 30, 4, 190--197.
[30]
Jakobs, K. 2006. ICT Standards Research -Quo Vadis? Homo Oeconomicus 23, 1, 79--107.
[31]
Krechmer, K. 2002. Cathedrals, Libraries and Bazaars. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2002), ACM, New York, 1053--1057.
[32]
Krechmer, K. 2007. Event report - The Open Standards International Symposium. Journal of IT Standards & Standardization Research 5, 2, 59--62.
[33]
Lin, C. Y., Huang, C. K. and Chiang, Y. H. 2009. Learners' Perspectives on Incorporating Drupal and Web 2.0 Tools in a Blended-learning Chinese Classroom. In Siemens, G. and Fulford, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2009, Chesapeake, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), 4223--4228.
[34]
Lundell, B., Abdurahmanovic, A., Andersson, S., Bergström, E., Feist, J., Gamalielsson, J., Gustavsson, T., Kahlbom, R. and Papaxanthis, K. 2012. How can Open Standards be effectively implemented in Open Source? Challenges and the ORIOS project. In Hammouda, I. et al. (Eds.) Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 378, Springer, Heidelberg, 383--388.
[35]
Mika, P. 2011. Microformats and RDFa deployment across the Web. http://tripletalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/rdfa-deployment-across-the-web/.
[36]
Mika, P. and Potter, T. 2012. Metadata statistics for a large web corpus. In LDOW 2012: Linked Data on the Web, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Aachen, Vol. 937.
[37]
Miklós, Z. and Sobernig, S. 2005. Query translation between RDF and XML: A case study in the educational domain. In WWW Workshop on Interoperability of Web-Based Educational Systems, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Aachen, Vol. 143.
[38]
Ohloh.net 2014. The Drupal (core) Open Source Project on Ohloh. http://www.ohloh.net/p/drupal, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[39]
Patel. S. K., Rathod, V. R. and Prajapati, J. B. 2011. Performance Analysis of Content Management Systems-Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. International Journal of Computer Applications 21, 4, 39--43.
[40]
Simcoe, T. S. 2006. Open Standards and intellectual property rights. In Chesbrough, H., Vanhaverbeke, W. and West, J. (Eds.) Open Innovation researching a new paradigm, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[41]
W3.org 1999. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification. http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[42]
W3.org 2004a. RDF/A Syntax - A collection of attributes for layering RDF on XML languages, http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/rdf-a.html, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[43]
W3.org 2004b. XHTML and RDF. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/02/xhtml-rdf.html, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[44]
W3.org 2006. Semantic Web Deployment Working Group (SWDWG) Charter. http://www.w3.org/2006/07/swdwg-charter, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[45]
W3.org 2008. RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing. http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-rdfa-syntax-20081014/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[46]
W3.org 2012a. RDFa Core 1.1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-rdfa-core-20120607/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[47]
W3.org 2012b. HTML+RDFa 1.1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-rdfa-in-html-20120329/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[48]
W3.org 2012c. RDFa Working Group Charter. http://www.w3.org/2012/09/rdfa-wg-charter, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[49]
W3.org 2012d. RDFa Lite 1.1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-rdfa-lite-20120607/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[50]
W3.org 2013a. RDFa Core 1.1 - Second Edition. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-core/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.
[51]
W3.org 2014a. About W3C. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/, Accessed 8 Apr. 2014.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. On influences between software standards and their implementations in open source projects: Experiences from RDFa and its implementation in Drupal

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      OpenSym '14: Proceedings of The International Symposium on Open Collaboration
      August 2014
      302 pages
      ISBN:9781450330169
      DOI:10.1145/2641580
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

      Sponsors

      In-Cooperation

      • TJEF: The John Ernest Foundation

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 27 August 2014

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. Drupal
      2. Open source software
      3. RDFa
      4. standards

      Qualifiers

      • Tutorial
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Conference

      OpenSym '14

      Acceptance Rates

      OpenSym '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 64 submissions, 45%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 195 submissions, 55%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)40
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10
      Reflects downloads up to 26 Jan 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all

      View Options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Login options

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media