MPDL NIMS Developer Meeting 2008-12-22

MPDL,ESciDoc,NIMS  Restricted Access to MPDL

Participants NIMS: Masao Takaku Participants MPDL: Natasa Bulatovic, Wilhelm Frank, Michael Franke, Ulla Tschida

Agenda / Discussion
MPDL/NIMS team was discussing the presentation sent from Masao, with some questions regarding further PubMan development and issues on functional requirements coming from NIMS. Outcome see for each topic below.

Code merging policy between NIMS branch and PubMan trunk

 * MPDL informed that SVN makes no proper merging between branches, as experienced with the last PubMan 4.0 release: R4.0 was developed in separate branch and then merged with fixed version R.3.8. It caused severe problems and respective delays.


 * MPDL proposes the following procedure for merging branches from NIMS into PubMan:
 * NIMS developer sends an email to the dev list (escidoc-dev-ext) that a merge needs to be done
 * NIMS developer provides brief info on what are the changes
 * MPDL developer will inform on earliest possible date when merge can be done
 * MPDL developer will make the merge and inform NIMS developer on dev list


 * As long as just one PubMan instance (for MPG, NIMS) is available, MPDL can merge only the following code /sources into PubMan trunk :
 * resource bundles with Japanese language translations
 * sources with new functionality or bug fixes (agreed in advance and properly documented) that affect common PubMan code and do not represent specific implementation of features relevant only for NIMS instance
 * first test merge can be done when NIMS developer visits MPDL end January (i.e. in case resource bundles are ready)


 * merging of new PubMan code into NIMS branch would be more standard, as NIMS may have specific features implemented
 * MPDL sends an email to escidoc-dev-ext when a new PubMan is ready to check-out from sources
 * the best time to merge the PubMan code into NIMS branch would be after first bug-fix release
 * MPDL will send information to NIMS how to follow-up changes from SVN logs

Specific displays due to word order

 * NIMS developer will check on new pubMan release 4.0 Beta ( preview available at http://qa-pubman.mpdl.mpg.de:8080/pubman ) and provide information on which pages changes are needed (only on search result list?)
 * MPDL will think of proper solution, alternatives discussed:
 * separate pages for NIMS
 * separate code for NIMS word order
 * added by Michael after VidConf: separate labels with values as place holders (best option, to be checked if sufficient, depends on outcome of NIMS analysis)


 * After reviewing R4 GUIs, I found that "word order" issue is avoidable by translation workaround, fortunately.
 * But some of more GUI wide issues arose. I will put feedbacks for R4 UI from NIMS people. Masao 04:30, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

IP-Based access to components

 * MPDL provided information that it is not possible at the moment
 * it may not even be possible in future due to Shibboleth based authentication mechanisms
 * MPDL provides already alternative solution for known user accounts (granting of "Privileged viewer role" for NIMS context to all users)
 * one possibility is to create nims_user account and assign the Privileged viewer role to this user
 * other possiblity is to create any needed user accounts and assign them with the Privileged viewer role
 * third possibility (not before Feb2009) to assign the Privileged viewer role to a group of users (and all registered users from NIMS will be grouped into NIMS group of users)
 * in any case users will have to authenticate themselves and log-in to the PubMan
 * Masao will crosscheck with Mikiko and give feedback to Nicole, to assign respective roles to user(s)

Author identifier service

 * We have come up to decision on how to implement the author identifier service, see more details below (also communicated to Mikiko):
 * provide basic Portfolio on PubMan side, based on PersonID, Search&Export interface and XSLT. (see Researcher portfolio and  Authors services )
 * provide a demo installation of integrated pubman data in Wordpress blog. This demonstrator can be used for convincing on quick wins and can be further elaborated as solution, if positive response.
 * for a first run, the installation can be done on MPDL side, incl a re-direct to a NIMS-specific adress. For technical details, please contact Natasa.
 * From NIMS a decision is needed for which user/user group we shall create the blog (Mr. Todoroki?), it should be user with PubMan account.


 * The following questions still need to be properly answered in future development, but for now only some simple answers:
 * How to treat co-authors?
 * Co-authors will have to be stored with some of user preferences, Person-ID or generated on the fly (has to be better checked)
 * How to add linkage between local and global IDs?
 * this would be part of Person (author ID) service, for each person many Identifiers (in external systems) can be provided
 * Integration with workflow (depositor or editor?)
 * this would require that for some users we have information on which person they are, this may become tricky due to Shibboleth and attributes that are sent for an user handle via Shibboleth (at present we only retrieve username). For more discussion on this issue, pls. check discussions on user management

Statistics or User usage monitoring function

 * MPDL will check thoroughly and provide the information on what is possible to track for user usage monitoring functionality
 * NIMS proposes the following (MPDL marked with bold text things that need to be better checked if they are possible) :


 * Access time
 * Session ID
 * User ID
 * IP address
 * Domain name, Country, Region (automatically extracted from IP address)
 * Accessed URL (item or fulltext)
 * Referrer
 * Next URL after visit (if available)
 * Search keyword (within eSciDoc)
 * Search keyword (from search engines) - automatically extracted from Referrer.
 * Agent names (browsers) - Agent names are effective for filtering out the robots or further analysis.
 * Will certainly not be possible: profiling/statistics by information such as gender etc.

Article on PubMan statistics and Discussion on PubMan statistics
 * MPDL at present works on designing extensions of basic statistics. The specification and current discussions can be checked at:
 * It is of big importance that MPDL provides visualization of the statistics, however, statistics visualization will not be sophisticated, as there is no sufficient data (for e.g. timelines such as last 6 months, last 12 months etc.) to serve as content for visualization

PubMan status&Miscelaneous

 * PubMan has a new release, still in test (R4.0, new look and feel)
 * Masao was asked to check it and provide some information on issues such as pointed above (word order)
 * Masao will probably visit MPDL end of January, which will be a good opportunity to make test merge into new branch


 * VERY IMPORTANT: there is a small chance that NIMS will not have own server infrastructure set-up before February 2009, therefore MPDL shall make sure that the presentation@A-LIEP and library board meeting (first week of march) can be run on MPDL infrastructure without disturbance


 * during discussion on resource bundles and translations, it became clear that NIMS has requirements for new genres and new metadata schema. As this is very heavily possible for PubMan implementation before May2009, MPDL proposes that NIMS specifies what are the missing genres and metadata on Colab, where metadata profiles are, and then MPDL will assess the efforts and timeline (as it is not purely a translation). Check current profiles specification at ESciDoc_Application_Profile_Publication and discussion at Talk:ESciDoc_Application_Profile_Publication. Please use discussion page (add separate heading NIMS requirements) to put your requirements i.e. NIMS requirements on Publication metadata.

Next Meeting

 * Next meeting: 13.01.2009, 9.00AM (Germany), 17.00PM (Japan)
 * Either VideoConf (IP: 192.129.1.126 ISDN: 498938602595)
 * or TelefonConference (0049-89-38602-223, Natasa's number)
 * Please put agenda topics at VidCo 2009-01-13