This charter was developed in accordance with the Eclipse Development Process and outlines the mission, scope, organization, and development process for the Science Project. This document extends the Eclipse Standard Top-Level Charter v1.2, and includes the required content and overrides which follow. It is anticipated that as the standard charter is updated, this charter will incorporate the changes and make adjustments as seen fit by the Project Management Committee (PMC), and with approval from the Eclipse Management Organization (EMO) and board of directors.
Overview
This document is the charter for a top level project (TLP) in accordance with the Eclipse Development Process. This charter outlines the mission, scope, organization, and development process for projects under its domain. The name for this TLP will be the Science project.
Mission
The Science top-level project provides a central clearinghouse for collaborative development efforts to create software for scientific research and development. These efforts strive towards the common goal of enabling reusable components across a wide variety of technologies. These components are implemented in different languages and operate across a diverse set of computing environments.
Scope
Interoperability is essential for scientific research and development. To address this issue, Science strives to collaboratively develop well defined interfaces, models, definitions, algorithms, and reusable software libraries, services, and applications. Specifically, Science projects provide artifacts such as libraries, user interfaces, frameworks and workflow engines that enable scientific applications and services. The nature of this work is scoped as follows:
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Standard descriptions and definitions of scientific data.
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Processing and management of n-dimensional data including both structured and unstructured grids.
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Plotting and visualizations of data in multiple dimensions.
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Workflow algorithms and their visualization.
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Machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, text mining and statistics.
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Modeling and simulation projects related to the physical sciences, including but not limited to physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and hydrology; and to the social sciences, including but not limited to sociology, psychology and economics.
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The collection and analysis of sample survey and experimental data from the same.
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Applied mathematics projects such as common math libraries and mesh management tools and with the exception of cryptography.
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Infrastructure to support scientific computing, such as tools for job launching and monitoring, parallel debugging, and remote project management.
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Control systems for analytical hardware.
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Tools and software to support data provenance
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Data storage tools, libraries and associated technologies to promote interoperability.
Licensing
Approved licenses for projects under Science include:
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The Eclipse Public License (EPL),
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The EPL and the Eclipse Distribution License (EDL, also known as 3clause BSD),
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The EPL and the MIT License, and
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The EPL and the Apache License Version 2 (ALv2),
with preference given to the EPL and EDL.
This list may be amended from time to time by the Science PMC subject to the unanimous approval by the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors
Addendum
The Eclipse Board of Directors approved in February 2017 that Science top-level projects can dynamically link to third-party components that are released under the LGPL v.2.1 license.
Approval of the Science Top-Level Project to allow the distribution of LGPL v2.1 dependencies
Mike Milinkovich introduced a proposal to allow the distribution of LGPL v2.1 dependencies under the Science top-level project, the related materials for which is attached as Appendix B. Mike indicated this was originally discussed at the October, 2016 board meeting, and at that time it was requested that the IP Advisory Committee discuss whether there were licensing concerns related to this request; Mike reported the Committee had no concerns. The Board unanimously
approved the following resolution:
RESOLVED, The Board unanimously approves the use of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 for dynamically linked Java-language thirdparty components distributed by projects under the Science Top-Level Project. The EMO will provide guidance to the projects to ensure that downstream consumers are aware that any such Eclipse Science projects contain LGPL 2.1-licensed components.