Bolsena 2011 - draft agenda

1. Community
   1. Committee
   2. Copyright notice in code and Licensing
   3. Contributors
   4. Community tools
   5. Community mini codesprint
2. Documentation
3. GeoNetwork
   1. Discussion on architecture updates
   2. New features & fixes
   3. R&D
   4. Presentations

For the 4th time, the ​Bolsena OSGeo Hacking Event is going to be held. This page lists some ideas that can be discussed within the GeoNetwork faction.

Please add any idea you have here !

Community

Committee

• Update AB ?
• Propose PSC update ?
  • Rather than remove members of the PSC who did contribute but no longer contribute, perhaps we could create a project reference group so that they could still be formally associated with the project? (We don't want to lose contact with them and we want them to have a role).
• Propose advisory board update ?
  • The organisations currently represented on the advisory board could be expanded/changed to include others? Members of the PSC could identify and submit names of representatives from these organisations for consideration by the PSC.
  • This may be a way of getting organisations that want changes (eg. those that submitted the long list to Bolsena last year) to get involved and commit $$ to make their list of requirements happen.
• See & update:
  • ​http://trac.osgeo.org/geonetwork/wiki/PSC
  • List of motions in the proposal page

Copyright notice in code and Licensing

(Added by Simon 19/06/2011)

Currently the code has a variety of copyright statements but most (C) UN FAO, some new code has (C) GeoNetwork. The problem is that if anyone violates the copyright or the GPL licence then we need to have the copyright assigned to a legal entity that has the rights, resources and the interest as only the copyright holder has the power to act against violations. Presumably the FAO is not interested in doing this anymore? and definitely not the non-existent GeoNetwork legal entity :-). GPL licensing means that we could assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation as per ​http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html.

To do this we need:

• list of past, present contributors
• assignment of copyright from all contributors and copyright holders
• all future contributions to assign copyright to the FSF? (add to conditions that have to be accepted by new committers? committer conditions)

Motivation:

• recently at least one commercial operation has begun distributing a modified version of GeoNetwork - are they obeying the GPL licence conditions that the source code be distributed with their modified version of GeoNetwork?

GPL Licence problems:

Others are cloning the GeoNetwork code, making improvements and have not (and seem to be not willing to) make their improvements available to the community in the form of source code. It's unfortunate that neither GPLv2 or GPLv3 Affero can guarantee that these modifications are returned to the community. GNU Affero is stricter as it has a few more conditions on how source code has to be made available but it still allows the person/organisation making the modifications to make them available to the public for a charge (ie. $$).

Any other comments? (I'm definitely not an expert on any of this and I can see quite a few people probably thinking this is all too hard :-) - if so then perhaps we should abandon the GNU GPL licence (requires agreement from contributors) and use some other licence eg. apache?).

Contributors

(Added by Simon 19/06/2011)

I'd like to see a list of contributors maintained on ​http://geonetwork-opensource.org/contributors and I'd be prepared to help out in assembling and maintaining such a list. List of contributors and their organisations could also be shown by the installer flash screen? Contributors page could have information similar to that provided on ​http://geoserver.org/display/GEOS/Contributors.

Community tools

• Community tools (sourceforge.net, ML, ...) should be accessible/manageable by at least 2 persons from the community (check that)

Community mini codesprint

• 2011 was the first time we've had a mini-codesprint, which is an event taking place some months before the traditional Bolsena meeting. In spite of the rather sparse attendance by GeoNetwork developers, some ​great results were achieved, such as good improvements to the Lucene analysis, impressive performance gains in search results display, and general refactoring of dusty code, amongst other things. Thanks to François Prunayre for conceiving and hosting this event. Let's do it every year, and if you weren't there in 2011, make sure you're there in 2012.

Documentation

• Update ​GeoNetwork logo ? There is some discussion that GeoNetwork does not really have a logo; a strong, graphical image that could act as a powerful symbol for GeoNetwork. The current graphics as on the default banner can hardly be considered a 'logo'; no need at all to have the project's name in the logo.
• Name change : isn't it better to call GeoNetwork "GeoNetwork", rather than "GeoNetwork open source" ? The "open source" suffix adds nothing meaningful and is rather non-standard for a name, as it's not capitalized. If size does matter, it's not in projects' names !
• Publish French documentation on the website

GeoNetwork

• On going projects ?

Discussion on architecture updates

Components

• GAAP
• Search
  • Search module: SOLR
  • CSW Search module ?
• GeoNetwork legacy = admin & editor ?
• What's metro ?
  • What type of communication between components ? ​JMS
  • ESB, Routine engine (​Camel)

Agreement on new or existing dependencies

• Security layer require :
  • Axis (or Metro, ​CXF ?) ​comparison
  • JAXB or JIBX (see section on XML binding ​here)
  • Spring security
• Javascript : heikki thinks that ​jQuery is in many ways superior to Ext.js, particularly in its programming model and the plethora of readily-available ​plugins for jQuery. Yet we need Ext because of GeoExt. Can we not isolate use of Ext to the mapviewer for as long as there is no jQuery equivalent to GeoExt, and use jQuery everywhere else ?

New features & fixes

• Security layer & GAAP
• JS Widgets :
  • file upload : where we have file upload functions, it would be nice if we provide a drag & drop function instead of the old, old, filechooser -- something like Gmail has it. Of course with perfect degrading for users of certain browsers. A very good one is ​jQuery File Upload
• i18n : it's a little hell to add a new translation of GeoNetwork. It's not in 1 place where you put some translated strings to i18n keys -- no, all sorts of files including js and sql and xslt files need to be updated. There's no documentation on all the places you need to touch. We shouldn't write that documentation either, now: instead we should make it very much more easy to add a new translation for GeoNetwork.

• Schema plugins - currently support plugging in metadata schema/profile composed of xslts, XSDs etc (ie. whatever is in a GeoNetwork schema directory) - also needs to support adding jeeves services eg. services to search and retrieve taxonomic metadata from the Australian Plant and Fauna databases for Marine Community Profile or to retrieve keywords from an online Oceanographic thesaurus (neither of these databases use standard interfaces but the searches are important to Marine Community Profile members) - suggestions/thoughts on how to add services to jeeves dynamically?
• Tracking changes to metadata - need to know who, what and when changes are made to metadata. How to do this in GeoNetwork? Perhaps a database driven approach which uses a metadata history table that is triggered from the metadata table? Some comparison of metadata records from different versions would still be necessary to determine changes because in it's simplest form the history table would have a complete copy of the metadata record in it.

• A rewrite of the harvester module/component is required at some stage (see proposal ​http://trac.osgeo.org/geonetwork/wiki/refactoring_harvesters). However for 2.8 this is a lot of work to get done between now and July when the RC process should start (if we are to release 2.8 in August?) especially if we wanted to keep the documentation up to date. Any word on whether this is still proposed for 2.7?

• ...

R&D

• Ontologies & thesaurus
  • Custom Lucene Analyzer
  • Thesaurus browser widget: like ​ArborJS ?
• CSW 3.0
• ​Hadoop, ​NoSQL : useful to investigate for GN's future ?
  • Some time was spent at Bolsena 2010 on investigating one nosql approach - apache couchdb (see presentation at ​http://geonetwork.globaldial.com/testdownloads/GeoNetworkCouchDB.pdf) - it has many interesting and attractive features for developers and does many things that GeoNetwork does. This presentation provided the opportunity to discuss the nosql direction with various interested parties in AU. The feedback depended on where and how they were trying to integrate GeoNetwork within their organisation:
    • Feedback on nosql direction from those that want to use GeoNetwork to manage their metadata in relational databases is not so good: almost all of these potential users of GeoNetwork (at least those I've spoken to in AU anyway!) want GeoNetwork to evolve toward using an object-relational mapping as they believe they have the skills to integrate GeoNetwork with the metadata they already have in their relational databases.
    • Feedback on nosql direction from those that are happy to continue managing metadata using their existing tools and databases but want to publish metadata to GeoNetwork because of its interoperability and standards support: they probably don't care as they are happy to use components like the WFS GetFeature harvester to build metadata records from the metadata in their relational databases.
  • Depends on where we want/or where we see GeoNetwork fitting within existing organisations?

Presentations

confirmed:

• GAAP Security module, by Jose García & Heikki Doeleman

requested (who wants to do it?) :

• SOLR in practice