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Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

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Chiara Friso, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Davide Taibi <strong>and</strong> Davide Tosi<br />

Moreover, the paper provides an investigation on a set of available OSS products for digital class<br />

rolls. The paper reports on the Italian laws that regulate the usage of digital class rolls <strong>and</strong> describes<br />

the most interesting <strong>and</strong> wide adopted solutions <strong>and</strong> their characteristics. The identified OSS<br />

solutions are also analyzed to highlight points in favor <strong>and</strong> points against in their adoption.<br />

These OSS products have been quantitatively evaluated by following the requirements <strong>and</strong><br />

indications provided by the Open source Product Portal Assessment (OP2A) model (Basilico et al.,<br />

2011). OP2A is a model for assessing the quality of web portals that publish OSS products. OP2A<br />

can be used as the starting point for certifying objectively the quality of OSS products. The model is<br />

built upon the results of a survey that the authors of this paper conducted in the context of the<br />

European project QualiPSo carried out to (1) identify the factors most commonly used to assess the<br />

trustworthiness <strong>and</strong> the quality of an OSS product, <strong>and</strong> (2) underst<strong>and</strong> the reasons <strong>and</strong> motivations<br />

that lead software users to adopt or reject OSS products. In this way, we are able to assess<br />

objectively the quality level of the analyzed OSS products, thus suggesting popular <strong>and</strong> also trusted<br />

OSS solutions for schools.<br />

2. Experiences <strong>and</strong> projects in adopting OSS in Italian schools<br />

In this section, we report on some experiences <strong>and</strong> projects about the adoption of OSS solutions in<br />

Italian schools with the aim of stimulating teachers <strong>and</strong> school managers in starting new projects<br />

related to OSS.<br />

2.1 Planning the survey<br />

We followed a systematic literature review (Biolchini et al., 2007) to survey the projects <strong>and</strong> the<br />

experiences about the adoption of OSS solutions in Italian schools. In this paper for space reason, we<br />

do not formally describe the steps we followed during the systematic review, but we describe only the<br />

objective of the survey, the research questions we wished to answer, the search strings <strong>and</strong> criteria<br />

we used, the electronic sources we surveyed, <strong>and</strong> the dimensions used to classify the primary<br />

studies.<br />

The survey was planned with the aim of identifying meaningful projects <strong>and</strong> experiences about the<br />

adoption of OSS solutions in Italian schools. This objective led us to define a set of questions that we<br />

hope answer throughout the survey:<br />

Q1: are projects <strong>and</strong> experiences available in Italian schools?<br />

Q2: are the identified projects <strong>and</strong> experiences collaborative or limited to single schools?<br />

Q3: are the identified projects <strong>and</strong> experiences a good starting point for other projects?<br />

The survey has been conducted <strong>using</strong> the following search strings <strong>and</strong> criteria:<br />

Open source <strong>and</strong> Italian schools<br />

Didactics <strong>and</strong> open source software<br />

Experiences open source for Italian schools<br />

Projects open source for Italian schools<br />

Open source Italian schools<br />

OSS <strong>and</strong> floss for Italian schools<br />

We used both keywords in English <strong>and</strong> also in Italian, <strong>and</strong> we manipulated the strings with logical<br />

operators (<strong>and</strong>, or).<br />

We used the following electronic resources:<br />

Search engines (such as google <strong>and</strong> yahoo)<br />

sourceforge (www.sourceforge.net) <strong>and</strong> schoolforge (www.schoolforge.net)<br />

OW2 (www.ow2.org)<br />

osor (www.osor.eu)<br />

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