Shortcut to temporal Google Doc used for editing during the call –  http://goo.gl/h0u7ke

Announcements

• Apps & Tools Working Group: next call February 24th at 1pm ET

• Changing to a new format to lower the cost of sharing: instead of a single presentation, will be hosting multiple short talks per call of 7 to 10 minutes plus some time for questions

• Paul will be sharing his work on author disambiguation

• Presentation template

• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QYF0riwZHiyuR6CgrVHBGVH9UtK-pqCEh8DDnB7ZZj8/edit?usp=sharing

• Link to Sign Up for talks. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18t0TNc56Xx1wPlDIgmV4lEp03qNM1mRRG8Un3mq8_gU/edit

• Ontology Working Group: next call February 10 at 1pm ET

• Topic will be Paul and Violeta talking about their local (Northwestern University) ontology extensions

• Chris Barnes will demonstrate how to add and delete an ontology from VIVO.

• 2015 VIVO Implementation Fest: to be hosted March 16-17 (with optional extended working meetings on 18th) by Oregon Health and Science University in Portland

• Official announcement at http://vivoweb.org/blog/2015/01/announcing-2015-vivo-implementation-fest

• Join in planning – Layne has requested volunteers for a short-term task group to organize - next meeting is at 3 pm EST on Tuesday, February 3

• details on the VIVO calendar (on the home page of the VIVO wiki) including connection information for the call

• Likely to have some in-depth focus on ontology given local expertise, and still open to input on other topics/themes -- more is on the wiki (accessible via the post above as well)

• Registration is free but required, on a first-come, first-served basis

Theme

VIVO architecture and roadmap – current thoughts and input on what a community-driven process should be – Jim Blake and Jon Corson-Rikert, with time for questions and discussion.

Jim Blake -- VIVO 1.8 Architecture

• VIVO 1.7 archtitecture diagram, for reference

• Three layers -- data, logic, and presentation, plus a security layer on the site that interacts with (primarily) the logic layer

• There needs to be a soft focus on the diagram -- the architecture is emerging as we do refactoring after a period of intense development on the NIH grant (2009-2012)

• boxes with black lined-edges are replaceable as modules

• so far these are sitting at the bottom edge of the diagram, partly because that’s where it has been most clearly needed and/or clear how to do

• Jim would love to see the template engine become a module that could be replaced

• applicationSetup.n3

• an RDF file that contains much of the configuration for the VIVO application

• The interface to a search engine is modeled closely on Solr’s structure

• The image processor is a small part of the code, but is now being made modular so that any code that can satisfy the requirements can implement or wire in another

• Application modules listed on the wiki -- search for “software architecture”

Questions/comments?

• Alexandre: any idea of decoupling the architecture? Maybe using a queue service that would allow the logic, presentation and data layers to be in different servers, for example to make better use of server infrastructure such as might be available through Amazon?

• Jim -- starting with 1.5 we added the RDF service to unify how the application accesses data, and paves the way for working with other triple stores, as Weill Cornell, Florida, and others are doing

• The search engine can also be swapped out

• Jim -- now common to put a triple store on a different machine (whether through Jena’s SDB triple store using MySQL or another triple store) -- this is fairly common

• Solr could be moved to another machine, as Duke has done -- they have two front end instances of VIVO web/Tomcat so it makes sense to share 1 SolrH instance -- Paul thinks Weill-Cornell may also be running Solr on a separate host than VIVO web app

• Hoping to reach the level of decoupling the reasoner to another platform by VIVO 1.9 -- and allowing some levels of the reasoning to be done inside VIVO and some outside

• Stefan -- does VIVO use Spring (the Spring framework) --  I've seen a single spring config file but I am not sure if it is actively used

• Jim -- the visualization code may use some libraries, but the VIVO application as a whole doesn’t use Spring

• Justin -- Can you briefly list the available APIs?

• There are 5 APIs listed and documented in the wiki

• How am I sure I’ve found everything in the documentation?  -- hard to say given the diversity of locations (vivoweb.org, the wiki, Git, mailing list archives, etc)

• What is the time frame for 1.8?

• looking at a code freeze in another week

Road map goals and process

• Slides on the wiki

• How should people who are interested in adding things to the road map submit requests? And then create task groups? Will that be managed by whatever road map group is set up?

• Layne -- the road map development group is not likely to be charged with implementing the process or governing/coordinating the task groups

Next Week’s Call

will focus site updates with a round-robin to present updates and get feedback or ask questions