First of all, I'd like to congratulate OODT on becoming a top level project and NASA for making this project available. Thank you!
From all the nasa.gov email addresses around here, I get the impression that in the early days of this project, most of the developers and users have been in direct contact or even within the same organization, so I'd like to share my experience as a complete outsider. I am familiar with the challenges of managing research data at a large organization with many research groups, so I've been trying to figure out what OODT does and what it could do for me. So far most of what I've found has been written either at a very abstract level for managers (the TLP press release and the OODT main page) or a very detailed level for developers (the javadocs). I haven't seen much so far for the "data people" in the middle -- the people who need enough technical detail to put the system into practice because they're tired of coding their own. This is my experience trying to get that information. The website has a lot of stub pages for the individual components, so I thought that I might be able to get some more information by downloading and running the software. This started as a NASA project, so there have to be stacks of documentation somewhere, right? I downloaded the trunk and built it using the instructions I eventually found on the File Manager page (http://oodt.apache.org/components/maven/filemgr/user/basic.html), but now I have a directory with a bunch of folders in it, and I have no idea what to do with them. The only tutorial I can find is for the File Manager -- which I very much appreciate, even though it doesn't completely work for me -- and there are only two files named README.txt in the entire project. As a result, I still have a lot of very basic questions: What do I do with all of these components? What do they all do? Which ones do I need, and which are optional? Are they standalone executables? Web services that require some sort of container? Do I interact with them using the command line, or do they have web or web services interfaces? What are the configuration options? What kinds of data and metadata can I manage? What kinds of roles do I need to have within my organization (administrator, content owner, metadata maintainer), and how does the software handle these? What do I want to do that this project can't? (In this type of software, there's always something that's just a little too specific to the original purpose or organization.) OODT claims to have a large user community apart from the original developers. How did it come to be that these organizations and individuals knew how to use the software? What sort of documentation and support did the developers need to provide in order to get them up and running? How can I get some of that? :) Again, I'm very grateful that this product exists and am excited to find out more about it. Thanks for making it available for me to puzzle over! Sincerely, Scott Konzem
