six questions for MS-OOXML

There have been on-going arguments against voting MS-OOXML as ISO/IEC. FSFEurope (in consultation with FSF India) has compiled six questions to national standardisation bodies to be asked against MS-OOXML. In a nutshell, these six questions are:

1. Application Independence ?
2. Supporting Pre-exisiting Open Standards ?
3. Backward Compatibility for all Vendors ?
4. Proprietary extensions ?
5. Dual Standards ?
6. Legally Safe ?

It is required that MS-OOXML provides conclusive answers to the above questions to be voted for ISO/IEC.

I have also posted the on-going discussions in India with regard to the above arguments.

OpenOffice and file format

Open Office is a free office suite application working on different operating systems. In OpenOffice it is possible to open and save files in the .doc/.xls format (which is not based on open document format). OpenOffice allows to share files which were created using proprietary software. When such options exist, people (may be by ignorance also) will continue to use the .doc/.xls format using the OpenOffice suite, in turn creating files which are not based on open document format.

Well, on one hand it lets people to choose but on the other hand it also allows people to save in file formats that are not open. I think that after opening a .doc file using OpenOffice and then further editing it, the possibility of saving as .doc file must not exist in OpenOffice. May be in this way, atleast no files will be saved/generated which are not in open document format. In this way, people can be directed to use the open document format for files.

representing biological statement into logical form

In continuation of my research work on representing the biological knowledge using the logical form, I have been continuing to analyze the statements which are usually found in a science textbook of India. What follows below is an analysis of a simple sentence.

Plastids are found in plant cells only.

This is a general sentence which appears in a typical biology textbook.

But first, we need to rephrase this sentence such that it can be represented applying logic as follows:

Given any cell, if cell has plastids then the cell is a plant cell.

In another simple way the statement can be rewritten as:

Any cell, if cell consists of plastids then the cell is a kind of plant cell.

In this above statement, given any cell indicates the quantification or scope of the following proposition. There is a condition that states the necessary property that applies for the subject.

(x)[Lx > Px)

where Lx states that Plant cell consists of plastids; Px states that cell is a plant cell; > represents the if then condition.

In this way, we can now represent the following biological statements—centrioles are present in animal cells only; cell wall is present in plant cells only.

Free Software and Science

Georg Greve, FSFE President and one of the SELF Board Members, is visiting India. We had organized a colloquium in HBCSE where Georg talked about “Free Software and Science” .

In addition to the often cited freedoms of the free software—use, study, modify, distribute; the speaker also made parallels about the free software and science on the basis of free exchange on knowledge and thoughts; falsification and expansion principles.

According to me the take home point of talk was about the freedom that free software provides to its users in terms of archiving and preserving the knowledge for humankind. Software is emerging as a digital culture, but who is controlling this culture. To me this is the issue that needs a serious thought.

A video recording of Georg Greve’s talk is available.

SELF Platform

As part of the SELF Project, a beta version of the SELF Platform is released alongwith the submission of the SELF Platform Documentation. HBCSE’s team is the main partner involved in the development of the SELF Platform. Soon the SELF Partners will be generating content using the SELF Platform. Initially, the partners have already created content using the Atutor application. This content will be imported in the SELF Platform and will be further used to build courses on free software.

About the SELF Platform: The SELF Platform is an on-line web-based e-learning system which is being developed using Plone for creating interface and GNOWSYS for storing the knowledge base. The Platform is being generated by adopting the standards of LOM, SCORM. It would serve as providing a central access for educational materials alongwith a community participation in a multilingual environment.

The SELF Platform caters to the target groups such as—universities and schools, training organisations, publishers, industrial manufacturers, free software communities, government bodies, public and non-profit organisations, private organisations.

SELF Platform Documentation

HBCSE’s deliverable of the SELF project consists of developing the SELF Platform, documentation of the graphical representation of structure and dynamics of the SELF Platform. On May 31st, the official documentation D5 has been submitted to the SELF Consortium and the European Commission.

The document is heavily graphics based, and my contribution to the document was to create loads of graphics of the following: GNOWSYS architecture; Class diagrams of GNOWSYS database tables; 3-layer model of GNOWSYS for SELF Platform, UML of LOM’s materials, UML for SCORM’s (Content Aggregation & Sequence and Navigation) model.

I have used Free Software based applications such as Umbrello for UML representation, Inkscape, OpenOffice for creating these graphics.