For each month, the data waerhouse includes three major parts.
- The tables supporting theSourceForge.net web site, for example, the tables user, group etc..
- The tables used to store the statistics of the whole community, including daily page access, downloads etc..
- The tables with the history information on the other tables.
The data warehouse contains SourceForge.net archive data, each in its own respective schema (sf_mm_yy) for the following months (note the gaps in 2003-2005, with all months available starting with February 2005 to
the present):
- January 2003 (sf0103)
- November 2004 (sf1104)
- December 2004 (sf1204)
- February 2005 (sf0205)
- March 2005 (sf0305)
- ...
- ... to present month
We suggest studying the "live" SourceForge.net site to see what kind of services are provided. This may provide hints as to what types of data might be available in the SourceForge.net data warehouse to support research into the Free/Open Source Software.
Types of Data that Can be Extracted from the SourceForge.net Research Data Archive
The following are types of data that we have extracted from the SourceForge.net Research Data Archive:
- Project sizes over time (number of developers as a function of time presented as a frequecy distribution)
- Development participation on projects (number of projects individual developers participate on presented as a frequency distribution)
- The above two items are used to create a "collaboration social-network"
- The above two items were used to discover scale-free distributions among developer activity and project activity
- The extended-communty size around each project including project developers plus registered members who participated in any way on a project (discussion forum posting, bug report, patch submission, etc.)
- Date of project creation (at SourceForge.net)
- Date of first software release for a project
- SourceForge.net ranking of projects at various times
- Activity statistics on projects at various times
- Number of projects in various software categories, e.g., games, communications, database, security, etc.
Since all of the archived data is stored in a relational database, data to support F/OSS investigations will be extracted using SQL queries against the data warehouse.
How to get research data?
The research data is available to those doing academic and scholarly research on the Free/Open Source Software phenomenon:
- Submit the survey form and signed license
- Study the "live" SourceForge.net site to understand the context of the data collection.
- Review the ER-Diagram (multipage version or single page versions) and the Table Definitions to identify research data of interest
- The researcher will be sent a userid and password that will provide access to a web-based form that will permit direct SQL queries against the data archive
- Submit email requests for support to oss@nd.edu
- Please review papers on FLOSS Research Ethics (here)
- A wiki for users of the research data has been integrated with the query pages here.
Research Data Archive News (here)
Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research Ethics: Please see the list of references on research ethics for FLOSS Research (here)
The material presented at this web site is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation, CISE/IIS-Digital Society & Technology, under Grant No. 0222829.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation
|