Integrated Digital Conferencing JY Le Meur CERN Jean-Yves

Integrated Digital Conferencing JY Le Meur CERN Jean-Yves. Le. Meur@cern. ch In. Di. Co 20 April 2004 EPFL, Lausanne

Introduction: the In. Di. Co Project 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 2

INDICO, an European Project Issues recognized by European Commission who finance In. Di. Co: Long term archiving of meetings material Enlarging access to scientific conference content Integrating multimedia into conference web archives Reducing conference organization cost The European Solution for managing and saving conference content in long term 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 3

INDICO Project Resources 26 people involved About 13 full time 2 years project : From May 2002 to end April 2004 1. 6 M euros invested 5 institutes: Italy: SISSA, University of Udine Holland: TNO TPD, University of Amsterdam CERN 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 4

Three Major Components Archives Traditional conference material and new increasing multimedia content must be preserved Video and Audio toolkits Content captured during events can be analyzed to provide better rendering and richest search capabilities Conference Management Software From announcement to proceedings, In. Di. Co software proposes a range of solutions to manage an event 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 5

Global View advanced search Service Providers filtering, etc. OAI Digital Library Multimedia (CDSware) Streaming Recording (SMAC/i. M 2) XML fs/rpc INDICO Conf Management. Institute 1 @ CERN @ 20 April 2005 Audio recognition Video segmentation INDICO Etc. @ Company 1 JY Le Meur 6

Conference Management System Overview 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 7

Some existing products (I) Commercial Eveni: http: //eveni. com Suvisoft: http: //suvisoft. fi/ Corg software Conference. com: http: //conference. com Softconf: http: //softconf. com Start software Freeware Cyber. Chair: http: //www. cyberchair. org/ Open Conference System: http: //www. pkp. ubc. ca/ocs/ Zakon Group LLC: http: //www. openconf. org Openconf CDS Agenda http: //agenda. cern. ch CERN And lot of home-made apps… 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 8

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 9

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 10

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 11

Reminder of what is a conference ! (I) Many people… Speakers Participants Web site users System Manager And more ! 20 April 2005 Referees Conference organization Chairperson Librarians Conference Secretary (sponsors, travel coordinator, publishers…) JY Le Meur 12

What is a conference ! (II) Lot of “objects”… Categories contain many conferences that contain many sessions that contain many contributions that may contain many talks with many attached material… Talks INDI ? Lot of processes 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 13

The Indico Technology 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 14

Development process Based on the Unified Software Development Process light weighted and adapted ü 5 iterations defined based on the use cases ü Activities & results: User req. Analysis UR-R 1 SSR Design Implementation Test Design model Deployment model Sw package Documentation Deployment procedures Automated test suite Implementation and use of several prototypes for validation and ensuring quality and scalability 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 15

Architecture overview conference CDSware organisers participants web OAI i. M 2 i. Conference i. Conf/i. M 2 PDF interface conference management user management authentication archives business persistence file repository system 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 16

Technology (I) UML for technical documentation (development models) Python ü General purpose scripting language ü Supports the OO paradigm ü High-level less developing time ü Java or C/C++ components can be easily integrated ü CDS has good experience ü Easy to learn for potential contributors 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 17

Technology (II) Persistence based in ZODB (Zope Object Database) ü Object Oriented database implemented in Python ü Transparency: no need for explicit read/writes of the objects ü Fits very well with our complex object model ü Performance 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 18

Technology (III) OAI (Open Archive Initiatives) for ensuring connectivity and integration with other services ü Standard protocol for information exchange between digital libraries ü Allows to expose conference data ü Data provider record=conference ü Allows other systems to fetch conference data and build services over it ü Simple mechanism XML over HTTP ü INDICO offers Dublin Core and a home made metadata formats 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 19

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 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 20

More information Production@CERN: http: //indico. cern. ch In. Di. Co Project: http: //cern. ch/indico CERN contact: mailto: indico-project@cern. ch 20 April 2005 JY Le Meur 21