InDiCo 20 April 2004 EPFL, Lausanne Integrated Digital Conferencing JY Le Meur CERN

20 April 2005JY Le Meur2 Introduction: the InDiCo Project

20 April 2005JY Le Meur3 INDICO, an European Project Issues recognized by European Commission who finance InDiCo: 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 2005JY Le Meur4 INDICO Project Resources 26 people involved About 13 full time 2 years project : From May 2002 to end April M euros invested 5 institutes: Italy: SISSA, University of Udine Holland: TNO TPD, University of Amsterdam CERN

20 April 2005JY Le Meur5 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, InDiCo software proposes a range of solutions to manage an event

20 April 2005JY Le Meur6 Global View Digital Library (CDSware) Digital Library (CDSware) Multimedia (SMAC/iM2) Multimedia (SMAC/iM2) advanced search filtering, etc. Service Providers Streaming Recording Streaming Recording Audio recognition Video segmentation Audio recognition Video segmentation OAI CERN CERN XML fs/rpc Institute 1 Institute 1 Company 1 Company 1 Etc. Conf Management

20 April 2005JY Le Meur7 Conference Management System Overview

20 April 2005JY Le Meur8 Some existing products (I) Commercial Eveni: Suvisoft: Corg softwarehttp://suvisoft.fi/ Conference.com: Softconf: Start softwarehttp://softconf.com Freeware CyberChair: Open Conference System: Zakon Group LLC: Openconfhttp:// CDS Agenda CERNhttp://agenda.cern.ch And lot of home-made apps…

20 April 2005JY Le Meur9 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 2005JY Le Meur10 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 2005JY Le Meur11 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 2005JY Le Meur12 Reminder of what is a conference ! (I) Many people… Speakers Participants Referees Chairperson Librarians Conference Secretary System Manager Conference organization And more ! (sponsors, travel coordinator, publishers…) Web site users

20 April 2005JY Le Meur13 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 processes INDI ?

20 April 2005JY Le Meur14 The Indico Technology

20 April 2005JY Le Meur15 Development process Based on the Unified Software Development Process light weighted and adapted 5 iterations defined based on the use cases Activities & results: Implementation and use of several prototypes for validation and ensuring quality and scalability User req. AnalysisDesignImplementationTest UR-R1SSRDesign model Deployment model Sw package Documentation Deployment procedures Automated test suite

20 April 2005JY Le Meur16 Architecture overview system business interface persistence file repository conference management user management authenticationarchiveswebOAIiConf/iM2PDF conference organisers conference participants CDSwareiM2iConference

20 April 2005JY Le Meur17 Technology (I) UML for technical documentation (development models) Python General purpose scripting language Supports the OO paradigm High-level  less developing time Java or C/C++ components can be easily integrated CDS has good experience Easy to learn for potential contributors

20 April 2005JY Le Meur18 Technology (II) Persistence based in ZODB (Zope Object Database) Object Oriented database implemented in Python Transparency: no need for explicit read/writes of the objects Fits very well with our complex object model 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 2005JY Le Meur19 Technology (III) OAI (Open Archive Initiatives) for ensuring connectivity and integration with other services Standard protocol for information exchange between digital libraries Allows to expose conference data Data provider  record=conference Allows other systems to fetch conference data and build services over it Simple mechanism  XML over HTTP INDICO offers Dublin Core and a home made metadata formats

20 April 2005JY Le Meur20 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 2005JY Le Meur21 More information InDiCo Project: CERN contact: