InDiCo 20 April 2004 EPFL, Lausanne
Integrated Digital Conferencing
JY Le MeurCERN
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 2
Introduction: the InDiCo Project
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 3
INDICO, an European Project
Issues recognized by European Commission who finance InDiCo:
Long term archiving of meetings materialEnlarging access to scientific conference contentIntegrating multimedia into conference web archivesReducing conference organization cost
The European Solution for managing and saving conference content in long term
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 4
INDICO Project Resources
26 people involvedAbout 13 full time
2 years project :From May 2002 to end April 2004
1.6 M euros invested5 institutes:
Italy: SISSA, University of Udine
Holland: TNO TPD, University of Amsterdam
CERN
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 5
Three Major Components
ArchivesTraditional conference material and new increasing
multimedia content must be preserved
Video and Audio toolkitsContent captured during events can be analyzed to provide better
rendering and richest search capabilities
Conference Management SoftwareFrom announcement to proceedings, InDiCo software proposes a
range of solutions to manage an event
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 6
Global View
Digital Library(CDSware)
Digital Library(CDSware)
Multimedia(SMAC/iM2)
Multimedia(SMAC/iM2)
advanced searchadvanced search
filtering, etc. filtering, etc.Service Providers
StreamingRecording
StreamingRecording
Audio recognitionVideo segmentation
Audio recognitionVideo segmentation
OAI
INDICO
@ CERN
INDICO
@ CERN
XML
fs/rpc
INDICO
@ Institute 1
INDICO
@ Institute 1
INDICO
@ Company 1
INDICO
@ Company 1Etc.Etc.Conf Management
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Conference Management System Overview
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 8
Some existing products (I)
CommercialEveni: http://eveni.comSuvisoft: http://suvisoft.fi/ Corg software Conference.com: http://conference.comSoftconf: http://softconf.com Start software
FreewareCyberChair: http://www.cyberchair.org/Open Conference System: http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ocs/Zakon Group LLC: http://www.openconf.org OpenconfCDS Agenda http://agenda.cern.ch CERN
And lot of home-made apps…
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 9
Some existing products (II)
Commercial products
Mainly hosting is proposed
Mostly service oriented, with “manual” intervention like hotels booking, paper shipping, etc Targets are large conferences. Not convenient for one day workshop No multi-conference features High Cost: each event is charged and additional fees often asked to participants Long Term problem: longevity of the web site requires to pay every year. Strong dependency on ‘small’ company
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 10
Some existing products (III)
Freeware products Very basic features proposed and poor web interfaces
Incomplete No much flexibility in the design Aiming at single event management Very little experience: not much used so far by conference organisers
With >10,000 agendas of events stored in CERN Agenda Application, we had an interesting starting point…
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 11
Major Issues
Variety of document types related to conferences
Variety of actors involved in Conferences
Difficulty in management of multimedia material
Richness of conference types (processes, structure, size, management, workflow…)
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 12
Reminder of what is a conference ! (I)
Many people…
Speakers
Participants Referees
Chairperson
LibrariansConference Secretary
System Manager
Conference organization
And more ! (sponsors, travel coordinator, publishers…)
Web site users
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 13
What is a conference ! (II)
Lot of “objects”…
Talks Categories contain many conferences that contain many sessions that contain many contributions that may contain many talks with many attached material…
Lot of processesINDI ?
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The Indico Technology
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Development process
Based on the Unified Software Development Process light weighted and adapted5 iterations defined based on the use casesActivities & results:
Implementation and use of several prototypes for validation and ensuring quality and scalability
User req. Analysis Design Implementation Test
UR-R1 SSR Design modelDeployment model
Sw packageDocumentationDeployment procedures
Automated test suite
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Architecture overview
system
business
interface
persistence file repository
conference management
user management
authentication archives
web OAI iConf/iM2 PDF
conference organisers
conference participant
s
CDSware iM2 iConference
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Technology (I)
UML for technical documentation (development models)
PythonGeneral purpose scripting languageSupports the OO paradigmHigh-level less developing time Java or C/C++ components can be easily
integratedCDS has good experienceEasy to learn for potential contributors
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 18
Technology (II)
Persistence based in ZODB (Zope Object Database)Object Oriented database implemented in PythonTransparency: no need for explicit read/writes of
the objectsFits very well with our complex object modelPerformance and scalability proved as it is the DB
engine of Zope
Apache+mod_python as application server
The web interface is built using pure HTML
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 19
Technology (III)
OAI (Open Archive Initiatives) for ensuring connectivity and integration with other servicesStandard protocol for information exchange
between digital librariesAllows to expose conference dataData provider record=conferenceAllows other systems to fetch conference data
and build services over itSimple mechanism XML over HTTP INDICO offers Dublin Core and a home made
metadata formats
20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 20
Final remarks
Released under open source license
Easy packaging & deployment
Multiplatform (tested on Windows and Linux)
Integration with other systems OAI
Already hosts more than 20 conferences at CERN and it is running in many institutes
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More information
Production@CERN: http://indico.cern.ch
InDiCo Project: http://cern.ch/indico
CERN contact: mailto:[email protected]