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Aquest article descriu el disseny i la implementació d'un nou entorn per a la interconnectivitat de components de localització distribuïts, tant de codi obert com a propietari, donant així resposta a l'escassetat d'estudis d'investigació rellevants en aquesta àrea, ja que considerem que la interoperabilitat és clau per aconseguir la integració completa de diferents entitats. La solució que proposem permet la interoperabilitat mitjançant un esquema d'arquitectura orientada a serveis (SOA) que es basa en els estàndards de localització habituals. Descriurem un escenari d'ús genèric i l'arquitectura de l'entorn que ens permetrà estudiar qüestions d'interoperabilitat en els processos de localització. Aquest entorn va ser presentat amb èxit en el CNGL Public Showcase que es va celebrar a la seu de Microsoft, Irlanda, el novembre de 2010., This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel environment for the inter-connectivity of distributed localisation components - both open source and proprietary - in response to the scarcity of relevant research in this area, as we view interoperability as being the key to the seamless integration of different entities. The proposed solution promotes interoperability through the adoption of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework based on established localisation standards. We describe a generic use scenario and the architecture of the environment that allows us to study interoperability issues in localisation processes. This environment was successfully demonstrated at the CNGL Public Showcase in Microsoft, Ireland, November 2010., Este artículo describe el diseño y la implementación de un nuevo entorno para la interconectividad de componentes de localización distribuidos, tanto de código abierto como propietario, con el propósito de paliar la escasez de estudios de investigación relevantes en esta área. A nuestro entender, la interoperabilidad es clave para conseguir la integración completa de diferentes entidades. La solución que proponemos permite la interoperabilidad mediante un esquema de arquitectura orientada a servicios (SOA) que se basa en los estándares de localización habituales. Describiremos un escenario de uso genérico y la arquitectura del entorno que nos permitirá estudiar cuestiones de interoperabilidad en los procesos de localización. Este entorno fue presentado con éxito en el CNGL Public Showcase que se celebró en la sede de Microsoft en Irlanda en noviembre de 2010.

International audience; Formulation of mandatory requirements in procurement projects has significant influence on opportunities for development and deployment of Open Source Software (OSS). The paper contributes insights on a widespread practice amongst public procurement projects which causes problematic lock-in effects and thereby inhibits opportunities for use of OSS solutions. Through a systematic investigation of 30 randomly selected procurement projects in the software domain the paper highlights illustrative examples of mandatory requirements which cause lock-in and presents five recommendations for how requirements instead should be formulated in order to avoid causing lock-in. Findings show significant lock-in caused by current procurement practices with a stark preference for proprietary software and SaaS solutions amongst procuring organisations.

Open geospatial data and tools are an increasingly important paradigm offering the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as well as social, economic and environmental opportunities. During the past decade, developments in the area of open geospatial data and open-source geospatial software have greatly improved. Many parts of the research community believe that combining free and open software, open data, as well as open standards, leads to the creation of a sustainable ecosystem to accelerate new discoveries to help solve global cross-disciplinary societal challenges, from climate change mitigation to sustainable cities. The consistent prevalence of open source GIS studies motivated this thematic collection. The contributions are divided into two main categories. In the first category, seven concrete studies on open-source tools and technologies for urban and environmental studies are briefly presented. Each one has been implemented for and applied to a certain use case, and at the same time it may be applied to other use cases due to the reproducibility nature of open source software. The second category presents and discusses the usability of open source geospatial solutions for laser scanning technology and its applications.

Use of standards-based workflows is still somewhat unusual by high-performance computing users. In this paper we describe the experience of using the Common Workflow Language (CWL) standards to describe the execution, in parallel, of MPI-parallelised applications. In particular, we motivate and describe the simple extension to the specification which was required, as well as our implementation of this within the CWL reference runner. We discuss some of the unexpected benefits, such as simple use of HPC-oriented performance measurement tools, and CWL software requirements interfacing with HPC module systems. We close with a request for comment from the community on how these features could be adopted within versions of the CWL standards., Submitted to 15th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS20)

As the automotive industry steers towards electromobility and electric vehicle adoption surges, Brazil and other Latin-American countries remain laggards. The Brazilian scenario exhibits unique features, such as a powerful automotive sector with large investments in internal combustion engine technology and a well-established biofuels market based on flex-fuel technology. Although energy security, urban air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, and technological advantage have been common drivers for the adoption of electric vehicles worldwide, the Brazilian immediate motivations are different, and the biofuels business ecosystem is likely to transform the path for electromobility. High tag price and public charging infrastructure absence have deeply discouraged electric vehicles adoption. A lack of regulation and a national consensus about the role of electric vehicles have been notorious. In fact, only in 2018 did the electricity regulatory agency (ANEEL) issue a resolution permitting the sale of electricity for recharging. The objective of this review was to create an outlook of the Brazilian transportation landscape. We identified relevant players, public charging infrastructure initiatives, market and other barriers, and regulation actions by consulting academic literature, media sources, and reports. We do not claim to predict the evolution of electrification. Instead, we aim to consolidate the information which can be used for decision support or strategy definition among entrepreneurs or policymakers. The main findings here are the necessity of a model for electrification able to create a synergy with biofuels and the urgency of having well-defined policies on what Brazil wants from electromobility.

The process of sharing of data has become easier than ever with the advancement of cloud computing and software tools. However, big challenges remain such as efficient handling of big geospatial data, supporting and sharing of crowd sourced/citizen science data, integration with semantic heterogeneity, and inclusion of agile processes for continuous improvement of geospatial technology. This paper discusses the new frontiers regarding these challenges and the related work performed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, the world leading organization focused on developing open geospatial standards that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless, and location-based services and mainstream IT.

The aim of this paper is to present a proposal for a national building standard in Sweden. We define requirements for the proposed standard, e.g., it should support development of 3D city models, connect to building information models (BIM) and national registers and be based on a national classification system for the urban environment. Based on these requirements we develop an Application Domain Extension (ADE) of the building model in the proposed CityGML 3.0 standard denoted CityGML Sve-Test. CityGML 3.0 includes several new features of interest, e.g., the space concept, enhanced possibilities to convert data, and to link to other standards. In our study we create test data according to CityGML Sve-Test and evaluate it against the requirements. It is shown that BIM models (in Industry Foundation Classes, IFC, format) can be converted to CityGML Sve-Test and that a classification system facilitates this conversion. The CityGML Sve-Test dataset can be used to increase the automation level in building permissions checking and a related study shows that CityGML 3.0 has capabilities to link to legal information and be a base for 3D cadastral index maps. Based on our experience, we suggest that the national building standard should conform to international standards and, if possible, include a classification system. The exchange format (GML, JSON etc.) might change, but to be based on a standardized data model ensures harmonized structures and concepts.

Scientific innovation is increasingly reliant on data and computational resources. Much of today’s life science research involves generating, processing, and reusing heterogeneous datasets that are growing exponentially in size. Demand for technical experts (data scientists and bioinformaticians) to process these data is at an all-time high, but these are not typically trained in good data management practices. That said, we have come a long way in the last decade, with funders, publishers, and researchers themselves making the case for open, interoperable data as a key component of an open science philosophy. In response, recognition of the FAIR Principles (that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) has become commonplace. However, both technical and cultural challenges for the implementation of these principles still exist when storing, managing, analysing and disseminating both legacy and new data.COPO is a computational system that attempts to address some of these challenges by enabling scientists to describe their research objects (raw or processed data, publications, samples, images, etc.) using community-sanctioned metadata sets and vocabularies, and then use public or institutional repositories to share it with the wider scientific community. COPO encourages data generators to adhere to appropriate metadata standards when publishing research objects, using semantic terms to add meaning to them and specify relationships between them. This allows data consumers, be they people or machines, to find, aggregate, and analyse data which would otherwise be private or invisible. Building upon existing standards to push the state of the art in scientific data dissemination whilst minimising the burden of data publication and sharing.AvailabilityCOPO is entirely open source and freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/collaborative-open-plant-omics. A public instance of the platform for use by the community, as well as more information, can be found at copo-project.org.

While many governments are now committed to release Open Government Data under non-proprietarystandardized formats, less attention has been given to the actual consequences of these standardsfor knowledge workers. Unpacking the history of three open data standards (CSV, GTFS, IATI), thispaper shows what is actually happening when these standards are enacted in the work practices ofbureaucracies. It is built on participant-observer enquiry and interviews focussed on the back rooms ofopen data, and looking specifi cally at the invisible work necessary to construct open datasets. It showsthat the adoption of open standards is increasingly becoming an indicator of the advancement of opendata programmes. Enacting open standards involves much more than simple technical operations, itoperates a quiet and localised transformation of bureaucracies, in which the decisions of data workershave substantive consequences for how the open government data and transparency agendas areperformed.Keywords: Open Government Data; Open Standards; Enactment; Infrastructure Studies; DataAssemblages

International audience; While IoT deployments multiply in a wide variety of verticals, most IoT devices lack a built-in secure firmware update mechanism. Without such a mechanism, however, critical security vulnerabilities cannot be fixed, and IoT devices can become a permanent liability , as demonstrated by recent large-scale attacks. In this paper, we survey open standards and open source libraries that provide useful building blocks for secure firmware updates for constrained IoT devices -- by which we mean low-power, microcontroller-based devices such as networked sensors/actuators with a small amount of memory, among other constraints. We design and implement a prototype that leverages these building blocks and assess the security properties of this prototype. We present experimental results , including first experiments with SUIT, a new IETF standard for secure IoT firmware updates. We evaluate the performance of our implementation on a variety of commercial off-the-shelf constrained IoT devices. We conclude that it is possible to create a secure, standards-compliant firmware update solution that uses state-of-the-art security for IoT devices with less than 32kB of RAM and 128kB of flash memory.

GeoBIM, the integration of 3D geoinformation (Geo) with building information models (BIM), is a subject of increasing attention in both domains. A well-known practical challenge for this integration is the mixed state of software support for open standards in each domain that would ease the integration. This is often known by practitioners but poorly documented. In order to solve this problem, we devised the GeoBIM benchmark, in which we compile the experiences of volunteering participants, who perform a guided study to test the software they are most familiar with against a few provided datasets structured in open standards. The aim of the tests is to improve the knowledge of the state of the art in the software support for GeoBIM open standards and to identify points for improvement. In this paper, we present the design of the benchmark, especially explaining and discussing the chosen data to be used with their connected issues to be tested, and some initial results.

An investigation into the implementation state of open standards in software is currently ongoing through the ISPRS/EuroSDR ‘GeoBIM benchmark 2019’ initiative, which kicked off earlier this year. The benchmark activity provides a way of assessing and comparing the functionality of different software packages in GIS and BIM in terms of their ability to handle standardised data (IFC and CityGML) and undertake various tasks using this data. Approximately 65 people have registered to participate so far, with participants from a wide range of backgrounds and proposing to test a variety of software packages. This confirms that the issues under investigation are of interest, and also meets the wider benchmark aim of having a variety of participants, since the project is conceived as using a bottom-up approach with cross-disciplinary and cross-expertise participation. While full benchmark results are not due to be submitted until later this year, interim results have highlighted a number of common issues across multiple software packages, and a web meeting for participants held in July 2019 also led to some improvements in how the benchmark results are being captured.

The Open Software movement serves as a landmark and a starting point for many “open-something” initiatives, such as Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC). However, under a pragmatic point-of-view, many of its basic principles are not considered specially when dealing with the above mentioned initiatives: common, industry-standard OER and MOOC lack a considerable set of really open features in a way that deviate the sense of the “O” letter – for Open – in its acronyms. Considering this, the present paper presents a systematization of these concepts around the general principle of openness. There will be discussed some strengths, challenges, and drawbacks in adopting openness as the key for OER and MOOC for Education in 21st Century.

Today, in order to confront the growing complexity of products and organisations, Aeronautic, Space and Defence (ASD) manufacturing enterprises are using more and more System Engineering, Product Lifecycle Management and Computer Aided Solutions for various engineering and management activities. Combined with a more and more important outsourcing, such trends led to the emergence of what is called Dynamic Manufacturing Networks (DMN). These DMNs are facing important difficulties for the establishment of PLM interoperability based on legacy PLM standards for Manufactured Product and Process data exchange, sharing and long term archiving. To address such issues, Airbus Group Innovations (AGI) has been developing a Federative Interoperability Framework (FIF) through iterations between research, operational and standardisation projects. FIF defines interoperability principles, brakes and enablers. Based on an analysis of DMN interoperability brakes and enablers, this paper proposes a new way based on FIF interoperability principles for dealing with pragmatic interoperability of PLM processes within the ASD digital business ecosystem. We propose a DMN interoperability conceptual framework, coupled with an experimental collaborative open platform (cPlatform), to achieve pragmatic PLM process interoperability. For this, we rely on DMN blueprint of PLM Business Processes developed within the frame of the IMAGINE project. The proposed approach is then assessed according to scientific, business and standardisation viewpoints. Today, Aeronautic, Space and Defence manufacturing enterprises' products and organisations are more and more complex. It motivates usage of System Engineering, Product Life cycle Management (PLM) and computer aided solutions for engineering or management activities. Dynamic Manufacturing Networks (DMN) are then emerging, but facing important difficulties for the establishment of PLM interoper- ability based on legacy PLM standards for Manufactured Product and Process data exchange, sharing and long term archiving. Extending a Federative Interoperability Framework (FIF) developed by Airbus Group Innovations (AGI) through iterations between research, operational and standardisation projects.

The built environment provides significant opportunities for IoT (Internet of Things) deployment, and can be singled out as one of the most important aspects for IoT related research. While the IoT deployment in the built environment is growing exponentially, there exists a gap in integrating these two in a systematic way through open standards and systems. From technological perspective, there is a need for convergence of diverse fields ranging from Building Information Systems and Building Services to Building Automation Systems, and IoT devices and finally the end user services to develop smart, user oriented applications. This paper outlines the efforts to develop a platform that integrates the built environment data with IoT sensors in a campus wide, web based system called Otaniemi3D that provides information about energy usage, occupancy and user comfort by integrating Building Information Models and IoT devices through open messaging standards (O-MI and O-DF) and IFC models. The paper describes the design criteria, the system architecture, the workflow and a proof of concept with potential use cases that integrate IoT with the built environment. Initial results show that both the end users and other research groups can benefit from such platforms by either consuming the data in their daily life or using the data for more advance research.

The building information modeling - BIM is a technology developed toward creation of computer based information model that encompasses whole building lifecycle. Toward that goal a number of information technology standards have been developed that enable different professions in AEC to cooperatively develop electronic building model. The paper gives overview of essential technologies, discusses their intended purpose, and gives outline of the currently achieved functionality.

International audience; During the last years, important research investments have been made by Airbus Group Innovations for the establishment of sustainable Product and Process data interoperability based on open standards. Driven successively by concurrent engineering, collaborative product design in the virtual enterprise or digital behavorial aircraft, it was capitalize through the establishment of a federative interoperability framework. Driven by factory of the future-related research, the dynamic manufacturing network (DMN) concept enriched the framework, which aims at providing agile infrastructure for networked collaborative product development. For such networks, protocols based on open eBusiness product lifecycle management (PLM) standards for exchange and sharing of product and process data between the implied organizations, their processes and the technical enteprise applications supporting these processes are needed This paper presents a new way of combining model-based enterprise platform engineering, model-driven architecture, and system engineering in order to adress the establishment of a sustainable interoperability within DMN. Based on relevant litterature interoperability issues, this paper describes the new approach, which relies on the association of effective existing technologies coupled with research results on the fields of model-driven engineering (MDE), enterprise interoperability, system engineering and PLM. The new approach relies on the concept of digital factory system (DFS) coupled with DMN in order to produce sustainable and agile collaborative infrastructure for manufacturing digital ebusiness ecosystem. The approach is then illustrated through use case coming from the IMAGINE project and an outline is provided on how it will be used and developed further for the assessment of PLM standards and their implementation in the Standard Interoperability PLM project at IRT-Systemx.

The Philippines is one of the eight founding members of the open government partnership (OGP) alongside Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States. The overarching concept of open government recognizes that good governance derives from the principle of transparency by providing an easily accessible, readily usable, and up-to-date online platform of digitized public records. Open data is an important component and commitment area of the OGP. The Philippines developed its first national open government action plan, which detailed nineteen initiatives under four broad outcome areas, from June to September 2011. This paper aims to: (1) document the historical development, key drivers, and milestones of open government Philippines and open data Philippines, and (2) pose recommendations for moving forward with its commitments. It reviews the composition and formation of the open data task force and showcases the features of data.gov.ph. The paper seeks to pose recommendations pertaining to the following areas: (1) release and manage organized, operable, and relevant data; (2) refine technical aspects of open data; (3) institutionalize open data within government; (4) promote civic engagement and stakeholder outreach; and (5) adopt complementary metrics and measures of success. The paper also opens a series of reports on the key stages in the development of the program, including implementation and impact evaluation.

Several European countries, as well as the European Commission, have acknowledged the importance of open standards (under various definitions of that term) and have taken steps accordingly. Formal (e.g. ISO) standards are often referred to in software development and procurement, but may not necessarily also be open standards. The authors consider the application of formal standards where national policy promotes their use, and, since much contemporary software development involves open source software, they further consider the interaction between the requirement to comply with open standards, and the implementation of open and formal standards in open source software, with particular reference to patent licensing. It is shown that not all formal standards are open standards. SSO policies and procedures regarding the notification of standards-essential patents (SEPs) present challenges for organisations wishing to implement standards in software since such policies and procedures need to be compliant with procurement requirements, patent licences and open source software licences. This paper draws out some implications for those organisations (differentiating where appropriate between small companies and other organisations) and suggests a number of ways of addressing the challenges identified. Use of formal standards may create barriers for implementation in open source software and inhibit an open and inclusive business-friendly ecosystem, and to avoid such barriers is of particular importance for small companies that are essential players in an innovative and international society.

For the Internet of Things to finally become a reality, obstacles on different levels need to be overcome. This is especially true for the upcoming challenge of leaving the domain of technical experts and scientists. Devices need to connect to the Internet and be able to offer services. They have to announce and describe these services in machine-understandable ways so that user-facing systems are able to find and utilize them. They have to learn about their physical surroundings, so that they can serve sensing or acting purposes without explicit configuration or programming. Finally, it must be possible to include IoT devices in complex systems that combine local and remote data, from different sources, in novel and surprising ways. We show how all of that is possible today. Our solution uses open standards and state-of-the art protocols to achieve this. It is based on 6LowPAN and CoAP for the communications part, semantic web technologies for meaningful data exchange, autonomous sensor correlation to learn about the environment, and software built around the Linked Data principles to be open for novel and unforeseen applications.

[ES]Desde el principio de la disciplina, el eLearning ha sido un campo novedoso que ha generado nuevo software, sistemas, contenidos y herramientas con los que se está experimentando. la interoperabilidad se convierte, en este contexto, en un problema. Los sistemas consolidados y empleados regularmente tienen que ser capaces de interoperar con otros nuevos. Este artículo trata sobre cómo varias investigaciones y lproyectos de desarrollo se reunieron para encontrar una solución a este problema, proporcionando especificaciones abiertas y normas, además de ibre, implementaciones de referencia de código abierto., [EN] Since the beginning of the discipline, eLearning has been about innovation. New software, systems, contents and tools are being created and experimented with and in constant evolution. But when systems, contents and tools become successful and part of the regular infrastructure of educational institutions, interoperability becomes an issue. Systems that are consolidated and regularly used need to be able to interoperate with new ones. And the new tendencies need to fit within the current infrastructure. This paper states how several research and development projects with heterogeneous funding sources and locations worldwide, gathered together to find a solution to this common problem, providing open specifications and standards, plus Free/Libre, Open Source reference implementations.

Nowadays, power systems face more challenging network wide issues with regard to ensuring secure and reliable operation. Therefore, having a wide area monitoring system is a vital need in order to detect problems and react on them as quickly as possible. An important component when providing wide area monitoring and control for transmission networks is the SCADA system, which connects the substations to the control center by polling data from Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, due to data rate limitations, the monitoring is relatively static and therefore infrequent. By using Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) data can be provided in higher rates and with higher accuracy. Since different manufacturers exist in the market, standardization is the key for advancement of the connectivity and interoperability within the system. In the past, utilities used to employ proprietary protocols, which were specified by the product vendors. Gradually, it was decided to move towards open standards to provide an interoperable environment and improve modelling capabilities. Apart from PMU standards, in a typical power system several communication protocols exist and are required for transferring data and each of them covering certain domains and specific groups of data. The objective of this paper is to investigate the adoption, development and performance of the most common open standards to enable interoperable wide area monitoring systems.

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term “envirofied” Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)., JRC.DDG.H.6-Spatial data infrastructures

At KDD-2009 in Paris, a panel on open standards and cloud computing addressed emerging trends for data mining applications in science and industry. This report summarizes the answers from a distinguished group of thought leaders representing key software vendors in the data mining industry. Supporting open standards and the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) in particular, the panel members discuss topics regarding the adoption of prevailing standards, benefits of interoperability for business users, and the practical application of predictive models. We conclude with an assessment of emerging technology trends and the impact that cloud computing will have on applications as well as licensing models for the predictive analytics industry.

Today's concepts of information and communication technologies merge is based on open network architecture standards and consistent development frameworks. Basic effect of synergy is visible through unique and common services. To enable convergence of existing network resources with new network concepts it is necessary to follow well defined interoperability standards and to use flexible/open technological elements. This article deals with basic analysis for component based architectures and of-the-shelf containers for service delivery environment in the telecommunication network. The analysis is based on the open standards and associated frameworks.

IFC, buildingSMART open standard for Building Information Models, is underused with respect to its promising potential, since, according to the experience of practitioners and researchers working with BIM, issues in the standard's implementation and use prevent its effective use. Nevertheless, a systematic investigation of these issues has never been performed, and there is thus insufficient evidence for tackling the problems. The GeoBIM benchmark project is aimed at finding such evidence by involving external volunteers, reporting on tools behaviour about relevant aspects (geometry, semantics, georeferencing, functionalities), analysed and described in this paper. Interestingly, few patterns are detectable about the behaviour of different software with standardised data, and significant issues are found in their support of the standards, probably due to the very high complexity of the standard data model. This paper is in tandem with Part II, describing the results of the benchmark related to CityGML, counterpart of IFC within geoinformation., Pre-print of the paper. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2007.10938

For the past decade, the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation have helped NGOs improve the design and implementation of projects, and measure results. We show how the Open Standards can be used to make better conservation investments as well. We introduce a risk assessment tool that serves to identify issues that inhibit success if not sufficiently addressed and a scorecard for tracking progress towards goals. We report on 25 of the 28 programs managed by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) that had metrics in place to assess performance. 76% of these programs were on track or further along than expected, while 24% were behind expectations. We argue that scorecards and internal assessments are useful components of a monitoring and evaluation framework, which allows for the early detection of problems. Programs that are behind should not be confused with failures; indeed, there are benefits for the conservation community to move beyond the labels of success and failure. We discuss real-world trade-offs in conservation science due to limited resources. Finally, we suggest ways to avoid what we call the funder’s dilemma—where donors feel they either have to adopt monitoring protocols that are too expensive or rely on potentially biased data.

This paper proposes a novel approach to build and deploy learning analytics dashboards in multiple learning environments. Existing learning dashboards are barely portable: once deployed on a learning platform, it requires considerable effort to deploy the dashboard elsewhere. We suggest constructing dashboards from lightweight web applications, namely widgets. Our approach allows to port dashboards with no additional cost between learning environments that implement open specifications (Open Social and Activity Streams) for data access and use widget APIs. We propose to facilitate reuse by sharing the dashboards and widgets via a centralized analytics repository.