12.12.12 Cotrix

Summary of several meetings. The last was held 12 December 2012,

Topics:

• Discuss the activities of the Cotrix developer.
• Discuss the collaboration strategy of iMarine and VocBench to arrive at shared components for data access and sharing.

Participants:

• VocBench - Tor Vergata: A.Stellato (Main architect)
• VocBench - Bangkok: Sachit Rajbandari, Sukrit (Ton) Chotepatarasri;
• FAO - VocBench: Y.Jaques;
• FAO - iMarine: E.van Ingen, A.Ellenbroek.

Objective

• Define a 3 Months short term work plan for Ton.
• Discuss a longer term collaboration plan:
  • VocBench as an iMarine client
  • iMarine as a VocBench client

PROPOSAL for a VocBench/Cotrix (very)High-Level Strategy

SHORT TERM

1. Ton studies VocBench/Semantic Turkey architecture, discussing with VocBench team as needed (Sachit, Andrea, Armando).
2. Ton designs and begins work on a Cotrix user interface using GWT and departing from a Vox perspective, i.e. a generic, configurable approach that could meet the needs of both the Cotrix and VocBench domains (but that is nevertheless not endlessly generic, it is still specific to the general domain needs of classifications schemes, code lists, taxonomies, thesauri and glossaries).
3. Ton might reuse as much as possible some of the already well-designed horizontal functionality of VocBench, such as user authentication, roles and rights management, etc. It is understood that these functions might fork from the current code as part of the need to meet generic Vox requirements.
4. At the same time that Ton is beginning design work in #2, the rest of the team, in particular Erik, Yves and Armando will consider the data model for meeting Cotrix code list management needs. This initial model will be expressed in RDF (possibly based on soon to be published W3C draft XKOS vocabulary) to facilitate rapid Cotrix implementation over the Semantic Turkey service layer, but will be understood to be capable of expression using other serialization paradigms such as relational, object-oriented or NOSQL models.
5. Armando and Andrea extend the Semantic Turkey service layer to meet the additional emerging needs of Cotrix. This should hopefully not be too much effort. If the effort is considerable, the teams should consider whether a) some of Ton’s time is employed in the service layer, or b) resources that are being considered for the alignment module could perhaps be diverted to service layer extension.

MEDIUM TERM

1. Sachit rebuilds VocBench GWT user interface using Vox components developed by Ton. This could be following the release of Version 2.0 of VocBench, or later depending on emerging requirements. This should make it possible for VocBench to also benefit from new Cotrix functionality.
2. Cotrix builds an OSGi-compliant alignment plug-in compatible with both Cotrix and VocBench, allowing for the mapping of multiple code lists, concept schemes, thesauri, etc. This may be delayed if additional resources are required for the service layer in short-term item 4. It may be possible to collaborate with the EuroVoc team on this module as they are highly interested in it and had already expressed the possibility of implementing such a plugin themselves.
3. Cotrix extends its serialization to other types of serialization paradigms.