Project planning meeting - 6 Mar 2006
Present: Stuart Yeates (SY), Graham Klyne (GK)
Last report: SakaiVre/PlanningProgress/20060301
This report: SakaiVre/PlanningProgress/20060306
Next meeting: 13 Mar 2006, 11:00 (GK has earlier dentist appointment) SakaiVre/PlanningProgress/20060313
Contents
1. Agenda
- Review agenda
- Confirm date/time of next meeting
- Review actions outstanding at last meeting
- New activities and issues arising from current work
- Discussion of specific issues
2. Activity since last report
2.1. Actions closed
20060301.1 [GK - 20060301] Check and cross-reference original project plan. COMPLETED: see (1), (2).
2.2. Actions progressed
20060301.2 [SY - 20060301] Project internal mailing list - ML requested, awaiting response from ML admins. Have confirmed that the Oxford VRE projects mailing list does have a web archive, which has been linked from this project (5).
- 20060301.3 [SY - 20060306] Initial diagram of flow styles - SY has many ideas in rough form on paper. They are currently quite abstract and still fluid; as they crystalize, we should meet specifically to brainstorm their implications for VREs in general, and searching in particular.
- 20060301.7 [SY - 20060306] Set up shared platform for Sakai test/demonstrator - Some preparatory work done, but we have not yet established what specific hardware will be available for longer term use.
- 20060301.9 [GK - 20060605] Port SPIE Shibboleth/WSRP to Sakai - GK has been in contact with Jasper Tredgold or ILRT, with a view to arranging a "handover" meeting, but no date is fixed as yet.
20060301.11 [GK - 20060327] Investigate Sakai background technolgies (Spring, JSF) - GK has added some notes on Spring AOP to the Sakai notes page (3).
3. New activities and notes
- Planning
GK has set up some project planning pages in the Wiki (4). (When the mailing list archive is available, these planning notes can be liked to relevant mailing list entries.)
GK will add labels and anchors to the project goals page (2) to provide a context for individual activities to link to.
- For the next week or two, we intend to maintain weekkly planning meetings, but will then drop to 2- or 3- weekly as the new regime settles in.
Under project goals, section 1, I (GK) would like to de-emphasize Shibboleth-enabling of portlets in favour of enabling the portal, because the appropriate technology support is not yet available; cf. (7).
- User requirements analysis
- (No new activities)
- Software installation
- Shibboleth is looking very complex to install. GK to determine requirements and installation procedure for a minimal test/development/demonstration Shibboleth deployment (i.e. not taking account of the complexities of institutional requirements, etc.).
- Other
GK has prepared a (rough) first draft of a note arguing that inter-portlet communication is an inappropriate approach to the problems it addresses, and proposing an alternative approach (6).
GK has started a page about Shibboleth (7). Currently it contains an explanation of the problems of using Shibboleth (version 1) as part of a Portal single sign-on, and how these problems are addressed by Sibboleth version 2. It is intended that this page will also contain notes about requirements and procedures for creating a minimal Shibboleth environment (see new action 20060306.2)
4. Discussion
4.1. Information flows and searching
SY's diagrams: there are several kinds of dataset, with very differing use and purpose in a research context, but . But there seems to be a common 3-tier pattern in the VRE datasets: attributes of the datasets (metadata), and relationships between the datasets and inividual researchers to interact with them. GK noted this seems to reflect some ideas of C.S. Pierce of "firstness", "secondness" and "thirdness", noted by John Sowa in his book Knowledge Representation (8). SY also notes that the security issues seem for the metadata levels seems to be in step with visibility of the dataset itself (at least as far as privacy is concerned, not currently so clear about integrity issues). The various views represented by the diagrams themselves are currently somewhat disjoint, and SY is still working to understand how they are representations of a common theme.
- Additional thoughts (GK): can the relationship data be regarded as a super-provenance? I.e. dealing not only relationship to an originator, but also to a user? Common technology requirements for differently scoped data - does this lead to an idea of Web and Intraweb, parallel to Internet and Intranet?
4.2. Inter-portlet communication
See (6).
SY had looked at GK's rough draft, and commented that there was some work on Inter-portlet communication libraries that should be taken into account by this discussion.
5. Summary of ongoing actions
SY will be travelling to OSS-watch related conferences this week, and will have limited time available for the Sakai work. But he does hope to use travel time to progress 20060301.3 and 20060301.4. GK plans the usual 2 days for the coming week.
- 20060306.1
[GK - 20060313] Add labels and anchors to project goals page (2)
- 20060306.2
- [GK - 20060403] Requirements and procedure to create a minimal Shibboleth deployment
- 20060306.3
[SY - 20060313] Provide reference to additional inter-portlet communication work that should be taken into account in GK's inter-portlet communication note (6)
- 20060301.2
[SY - 20060301 -> 20060313] Project internal mailing list - awaiting ML admins.
- 20060301.3
- [SY - 20060306] Initial diagram of flow styles
- 20060301.4
- [SY - 20060313] Distillation of C P Snow observations
- 20060301.5
- [SY - 20060327] Analysis of search requirements
- 20060301.6
- [GK - 20060306] Outline of search requirements from life science research
- 20060301.7
- [SY - 20060306] Set up shared platform for Sakai test/demonstrator
- 20060301.8
- [GK/SY - 20060313] Install Sakai
- 20060301.9
- [GK - 20060605] Port SPIE Shibboleth/WSRP to Sakai:
- [20060403] Conduct handover/briefing from Jasper
- [20060703] (Sakai installation dependency, Sakai Shibboleth authentication dependency) Install Shibboleth/WSRP software locally, and convert to work with Sakai
- 20060301.10
- [GK - 20060703] Add Shibboleth authentication to Sakai
- [20060313] Arrange discussion with SPIE team for advice on Shibboleth-enabling a web application
- [20060413] Determine requirements to run member of Shibboleth federation
- [20060403] Install Shibboleth toolkit
- [20060605] (Sakai installation dependency) Link Sakai authentication to Shibboleth
- 20060301.11
- [GK - 20060327] Investigate Sakai background technolgies (Spring, JSF)
6. References
http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/InterPortletCommunicationConsideredHarmful
John F. Sowa, Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical and Computational Foundations, Brookes/Cole, 2000. ISBN 0-534-94965-7.
7. Notes for next meeting
(Matters arising following the meeting)
GK - Updated ShibbolethNotes to give some account of SAML and Shibboleth versions.
GK - Minor updates to inter-portal communication notes (InterPortletCommunicationConsideredHarmful)
GK - Project goals reformatted with labels and anchors, indication of status and links to related working documents (SakaiVre/ProjectGoals)
GK - Created some initial notes about standards and portals (MakingStandards)
-- -- GrahamKlyne 2006-03-06 11:28:43
