Exhibit 3 F2F – A mid-course review of development and project status Mountain View, 7/12/2011 & 7/13/2011
Attending in person: Google (hosts): David Huynh, Stefano Mazzocchi Library of Congress: Chris Thatcher MIT Libraries: Richard Rodgers, MacKenzie Smith Zepheira: Eric Miller, Ryan Lee, Mark Baker, Uche Ogbuji Attending via teleconference: MIT CSAIL: David Karger *Meeting Objectives* - Increase transparency among the PI and project team with respect to focus and direction - Evaluate progress of design and coding - Accelerate the refactoring of the code, and where best to put in place abstraction points based on lessons learned to-date - Clarify collectively the project metrics of success - Develop a road-map for creating a sustainable community - Continue to explore models on the most effective means for the core teams to interact *Meeting Summary* The meeting validated crucial project assumptions and produced a narrower, clearer path of development for the remainder of the project. It also identified several valuable reference datasets, together with related performance metrics, and outlined more concrete plans for engaging the community as progressively functional releases become available. Major findings and accomplishments: 1. The SIMILE Backstage code was established as a viable basis for the server end of the staged configuration in terms of scale and performance, based on testing with datasets whose characteristics matched deliverable requirements. Backstage is an Exhibit data server POC, built on technology stack similar to Longwell (Sesame triple-store, etc). The server API, however, should not necessitate any specific stack, just a set of scale-related performance characteristics. 2. Therefore, a number of specific modifications were recommended to the Backstage codebase, including newer Sesame version, refactor for triple-store aggregation functions, etc. 3. Although laden with interesting possibilities, an end-to-end staged javascript Exhibit3 design using Node.js was deemed too ambitious given current project resources at this time. 4. We affirmed the definition of simple Exhibit language in HTML (as opposed to javascript) to preserve ease of use/existing Exhibit model. 5. Several reference/sample datasets were created and staged on the order of 100k records, from LC and Zepheira sources. 6. We determined that simple ‘remoting’ of database.js methods (i.e. to http requests) would not immediately be feasible - refactoring would be required to alter assumptions of locality. 7. We resolved that Exhibit3 deployments would manage their own external service dependencies (e.g. Babel), so that MIT & simile-widgets.org would wind down operation as public services. 8. Therefore, a concrete plan and schedule was devised for decommissioning the public infrastructure (Babel, Painter, etc). Briefly, MIT SIMILE services black out in Sept 2011, and simile-widgets in January 2012. 9. Documentation requirements were extensively clarified and a roadmap was established for building them out. The extensive internal code-level documentation will form the basis of end-user documentation. 10. We resolved that initial focus of Exhibit3 would concentrate on a very small number of views: possibly only one beyond a list view – viz Timeline. The view API will include a ‘capacity’ declaration to allow views to limit visual density, and a pagination function. 11. We outlined a community engagement strategy, with specific provisions for public demos using appropriate datasets, notifications of packaged releases, GitHub monitoring, etc -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SIMILE Widgets" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/simile-widgets?hl=en.
