Context

The VIVO Roadmap is a fundamental element of the VIVO open source software project.  The roadmap combines priorities from the constituencies (community, leadership and steering), along with strategic considerations from the strategic plan, technical considerations from the developers, and effort as determined by volunteers.

Deliverables

• A high-level VIVO roadmap for the next twelve months with strategic features identified

DRAFT Schedule

The task force has four weeks to draft and present a roadmap

Members

Mike Conlon

Jon Corson-Rikert

Jim Blake

Alex Viggio

Justin Littman

Benjamin Gross

Materials

Survey Summary by Category and Constituency

Survey_66692934 (1).pdf.  

Meeting Times

Mike is out the week of July 20 and Jon is out the week of July 27.  Much will be done by email with calls as needed.

Communication Channels

• The wiki will contain progress information as will the weekly VIVO Updates emails

• Mike Conlon briefs the Steering Group as needed
• The proposed roadmap will be reviewed by Steering on August 7 and presented to Leadership on August 12
• A poster is planned for the conference

Progress Report

August 4

The group met to discuss the roadmap.  A presentation will be made to Leadership on August 12.  The presentation will be high level 45 major items with description of what's in and out, next steps, and possible sprint resulting from the work. We do not have an effort budget – we have effort as volunteered by the community.  The roadmap survey allowed community members to volunteer for specific features.  Much work will be needed to revise the simple one-line descriptions in the survey to architectures, use cases, designs capable of being developed.

Following discussion, the group identified four broad themes for the roadmap: 1) Data patterns for ingest.  By identifying patterns and reproducible processes, we encourage adoption and simplify technical evaluation. We foster development of standard ingest apps and tools. 2) Data patterns for output. Similarly, by providing simple APIs for getting data from VIVO, we encourage development of apps and tools for display, reporting, and other reuses of VIVO data. 3) Performance and scaling.  Issues of performance are critically important.  There are many aspects to performance, including the templates and their use of SPARQL, support for alternate triple stores, JVM tuning and much more. 4) Visualization, UI and Theming.  Architectural work will be needed to identify best approaches for building the next generation of VIVO visualizations – upgrading, replacing and augmenting the visualizations currently in VIVO.  Considering this in the context of UI and theming improvements should help identify items that may be easier to tackle and those requiring more significant architectural approaches.

The survey features have been grouped by the four themes for analysis purposes.  See Survey Features Grouped for Analysis

The group volunteered to build out thoughts around the four themes:  1) Justin, 2) Jon, 3) Jim, 4) Mike.

The group will have another call on August 6.

August 6

The group continued its discussion, reviewing material covering the four themes.  A Google Drive Folder has the task force materials

The survey asked people if they would volunteer to work on items.  Several survey items rose above the 1 or 2 volunteers that many items received (one or two volunteers can be very important if the right person is volunteering)