Wednesday Developer Meeting notes - ADR

Owned by Aron Roberts (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 10, 2012Version comment
6 min read

Rough notes from Developer Meeting sessions on Wednesday, 2012-02-08

Implementations, methods, tools (13:15-14:30)

MMI

Working on deployment from 1.5-on
Have two servers
Someone else doing imports in different time zone

Data matches SPECTRUM for the most part
CollectionObject most difficult to extend, use 50%, added 20%

Are going to be adding 2 new procedures, 2-3 new authorities, haven't yet done any of that.

Creating a collections browser, ongoing. Hired MMI's museum website contractors. Mapping from wireframes.
How to use advanced search in services, would like implicit joins.

Patrick:
Use the app layer, aggregate services into a different model
Another database views
Another warehouse approach, ETL data out of services

5K records in collections browser
200K total records

our current CMS, have images on Windows share

a lot of Jesse's notes are on the deployer wiki, some are now outdated
useful stuff like "how do I make a different field show up on the search results"

  • How do we make it easier to take advantage of each others' notes / documentation

Currently using CollectiveAccess, kind of tailored to our needs

SMK

Painting sculpture 10.5K
Graphic art 240K
plaster casts in warehouse 2.5K
back 700 years

Kirsten Vittrup (PM), Kim Brasen (mapping, creating a shareable domain for fine arts) museum curators

In-house application just for the museum
Custom-made, expectations quite high for anything that replaces it, lots of custom fields
1200 fields to look at, not sure how many are active, not just internal, etc.
MSSQL, extra layer of abstraction, Globus, between app and DB, difficult to understand, closed source, external contractors
45K in now, 200K waiting, no plan now about adding those, mostly graphic works, some in books (book and each page are objects)

would be happy with 45K

making both domain and local extensions, easier to make just local, but decided to carry on with domain
basing on Getty standard, CDWA, for comprehensively describing works of art

challenge to find those matching collectionspace core, create all others

bookkeeping of extensions is quite heavy
how do we describe and document the work of these contributions

with each upgrade of collectionspace

Authorities:
Name
Citation (reuse)
Archive
Exhibition
Place (reuse)
Concept (reuse)

Added Physical Characteristics section to Cataloging

Haven't yet used Getty vocabs, etc.

Customizing we'd like
New structured date module
Automatic display text generation - suggestions based on drop-down, but overrideable via free text

  • Multiple language
  • Guide user behavior

Automatic start/end date generation based on more simple input; e.g. 20th century, generate earliest and last dates
Quarter, half, middle, end, decade, period, century, based on requests from staff at the museum, more or less copied from existing system
Boundary checking for dates

Requires:

  • Extensions
  • Date library for date arithmetic
  • Use case for replacing widget or customizing widget

Integrations we're waiting to do
AD
DAM
Exhibition management
Public web browsing
Export to Regin
Condition database
Literature references - downloads of references to items in the collection from the National Library, pulling them in automatically
ConservationSpace

Walker

Have a basic schema extension, consisting of simple fields
Import mapping from CDWA
Building a domain for performing arts

Using FM Pro now, "it's just like you think"
have a mapping to CDWA Lite done several years ago, covers artwork in collection decently

bigger hassles:
registration data
fields that aren't mapped nicely into CDWA Lite

Just launched a new Walker website, now shifting gears to this
Collections management
and new Getty grant for online scholarship initiative
make a living catalog, including performances

driving in a round-about way, the public version of this
meant to replace a print publication
not looking at a live connection via the API, some sort of warehousing, dumping, scraping

here are these moments that this artist intersected with the Walker
scholarly articles, references, not all in the CMS

Charlie Moad, using Nuxeo as a DAM, live-ish
possibly as a document management system as well
exciting possibilities, if there's any 'there there'
just a folder hierarchy now, EXIF data and whatever Adobe data is there
if have first class representations of each other

interested in using the application layer

UC Berkeley museums

Data mapping and migration

Create database views
Use Talend to create payloads
Import using curl

Building place, concept, citation authorities to contribute back
Button to fetch editable URL and navigate to DAM

Run batch process, data extraction, etc.

History of Art on hold
We do catalog individual works of arts, etc.
But media handling records are themselves our collection objects
Have to document sources
Hammering on citation authority esp. important to use, documenting sources
Concept authority as basis for styles, periods, materials, techniques, cultures, all of which describe a cultural object
Place authority important, describes places where things are
Standardized forms of artists' names

Wish to use forms of terms, singular, plural, in different languages, in vocabularies
With citation authority, go out to external databases, bring it in, export it in a variety of formats, must hold that information in sufficiently granular form

Botanical propagation, mapping design work
Propagation procedure that Botanical Garden is looking to add, designing wireframes
Involves repeating group with a repeating table within that group
Visually fitting onto very long, vertically scrolling pages, being able to visually grasp

Mapper widget for places, latitude and longitude, can quickly see on a map where objects are
Many objects, incorporate into search results page
Also for individual records
Be able to use the map to inform lat/long locations
Use a georeferencing system

Tools for mapping, use big mapping services out there
Web service, give it a genus or other taxonomic rank names, give back polygon extents of known ranges
with GIS query system, can find out about other things in that same range

In anthropology, could show extents of cultures, integrate with these

Biogeomancer, given a string, find a set of likely place names
One one hand, disambiguating all the "San Jose"s of the world
In another, language processing to propose lat/long when given text strings
Looking at integrations

In lifesci
GeneBank and others

Call out to Getty, store preferred term
go to web service, here is term id, go back, see if it's in the database
(didn't quite understand Jan's point - would be good to go back and ask)

As an option, go hit the Getty, see what the current thinking is around the term
Library of Congress has services like this, around subjects

Wikispecies, Wikipedia model for tracking taxa
In practice, awkward and sparse, but an example
Might be able to navigate to a page there

Exposing vocabularies that start out ad hoc in-house,
then become authoritative

Sometimes separate out AAT and in-house, then propose changes to Getty
Can semi-automate those changes

R1 universities with teams that support museums and research collections

Development process, tools, repos (14:30-15:15)

Two areas with a bulk of app layer tests

cspi-services
most important are xml/json two-way conversions
selection of hard-coded service and UI payloads

tomcat-main
focus more on working on the app layer stack, going out to UI/app
start with JSON, will it go out and back with a 200, 400 or whatever

app layer is more of a responsive development mentality
"this needs to happen," and I try to make it happen

try to keep things simple, when we see a pattern, abstract it

cspi-webui
need to rationalize uispec and uischema creation
more standard now, can refactor based on that
will become easier to see how things are done, extend things

hope is that no matter how complex a widget is,
you should be able to do this via configuration

weirdness in structured dates, blobs and medias that needs unifying

app can import an authority via the app layer from a text file
we need to document this and other 'magic' commands better

eGit plug-in for Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/egit/

Yura mostly using command line for more complicated stuff, e.g. combining branches or contributions

Good UI client
Yura mentioned Atlassian tool used by Toronto, SourceTree http://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/overview

Per Chris/Nate/Yura, GitHub's own tool, GitX, is somewhat disappointing
Patrick has had some issues with Tortoise for git, feels not as good as Tortoise for SVN

gitFlow, abstraction with making merging and branches a little nicer
git start branch
git finish branch
workflow shortcuts, makes what is hard to remember easier https://github.com/nvie/gitflow
Introduction: http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flow/

Strategies for extensions (15:25-17:00)

The following notes for this session are sparse - randomly selective

What support GitHub provides for community contributions
tagging or naming conventions

Nate: Would likely coalesce around a "good enough" schema, use it thereafter
(Jesse mentioned that phrase)

Patrick:
Business-to-business transfer of loans
Possibility of pluggable export tools, like reports and batch processes

Templates might consist only of language translations of message bundles
Templates for ETL tools - at least as an example; even a bunch of Perl scripts

Local development in the UI layer with record.html
Missing from the mini-build

Ubuntu
has done a good job of distinguishing between:

  • this is core
  • this is community
  • this is the wild west

Django
everything's in the contrib directory
when you check it out, you get all that

A big question / assumption is that you can get your data back out, not just a database dump

Hosting providers can potentially do a better job of backing up, resting restores, etc.

Generating from app layer config might help simplify community contributions