Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Chiara Friso, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Davide Taibi and Davide Tosi
4. OP2A evaluation of the OSS digital class rolls
The adoption of a new OSS tool is not a trivial task. Usually, when users face with the adoption of a
new product, they surf on search engines and look for the product that best fits their requirements.
In (Basilico et al., 2011), Basilico et al. defined OP2A (Open source Product Portal Assessment), a
method for evaluating the quality of the information provided by the websites that host OSS products.
Unlike other evaluation methods, OP2A evaluates the website instead of the product quality and aims
at ensuring both the availability of information and also its accessibility. OP2A evaluation is based on
the simulation of the assessment of a new OSS product. During the simulation, an assessor will fill in
a checklist by looking for a list of information provided. The OP2A method is based on the percentage
of information provided and it scores the availability of the information by means of a weighted sum.
On January 2011, OP2A website scores 20 evaluated projects while at the time of writing there are
more than 60 evaluated projects. This highlights the activity of the community in evaluating products
and sharing opinions on the evaluations itself.
We applied the OP2A checklist to the tools identified in Section 3.2. Table 3 summarizes the results of
the assessment providing, for each OP2A section, the percentage of information available on the
website. Each information category is divided in sub category. For example, the “requirement”
category, is composed by disk usage, Memory usage, Min CPU required, Other HW requirements,
Supported operative systems, and Required 3rd parties components.
Table 3: Assessments of the OSS digital class rolls with the OP2A methodology
Information Il Registro Registro del ClaSS Teach2000 i-Class
Professore
Overview 56.4% 56.4% 85.2% 77.8% 77.8%
Requirements 83.3% 16.6% 66.6% 0% 0%
License 0% 0% 48.3% 51.6% 0%
Documentation 11.5 11.5% 23% 8.63% 2.87%
Downloads 75 25% 100% 75% 74%
Quality Reports 36.3 27.2% 0% 0% 27.2%
Community and support 0% 9.59% 58.6% 52.9% 49.4%
We didn’t analyzed “Silente registro elettronico”, Hermes and Engrade because OP2A can analyze
only OSS products. In this case, “Silente is a closed source product, Engrade is a SaaS and does not
provide the tool itself, while Engrade website is very trivial and does not provide enough information
even to start the OP2A evaluation. The experimentation shows that the quality of the analyzed portals
is not adequate in general, thus needing a strong refactor of the portal itself to achieve an acceptable
level of quality so as to allow users to easily adopt the products. The vast majority of the tools do not
allow to evaluate requirements, do not specify the type of license and any information about the
usage in other schools. These data suggest that, very often, these tools are developed by private
users without specific skills instead of by a structured community of developers.
Detailed results on all evaluations can be found on the OP2A website (www.op2a.org)
5. Conclusions
In this paper we report on two literature surveys we conducted about the availability of experiences
and projects focused on OSS solutions for the Italian schools, and the availability of OSS digital class
rolls. The literature surveys can provide a lot of interesting suggestions to simplify the start of new
projects and new experiences in adopting OSS solutions in Italian schools.
References
Basilico, G., Lavazza, L., Morasca, S., Taibi, D., Tosi D. (2011) OP2A: Assessing the Quality of the Portal of
Open Source Software Products, In Proceedings of the 7 th International Conference on Web Information
Systems and Technologies, Netherlands, May.
Battistoni, M., (2008) Open Source Software Survey in Italian Schools. Web published. www.osor.eu.
Accessed: March 2011.
Biolchini J., Mian P.G., Natali A.C., Conte T.U., Travassos G.H., (2007) Scientific research ontology to support
systematic review in software engineering. Advanced Engineering Informatics 21(2): 133-151
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