Integrated Digital Conferencing

1. JY Le Meur CERN Jean-Yves.Le.Meur@cern.ch Integrated Digital Conferencing

2. Introduction: the InDiCo Project JY Le Meur

3. 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 JY Le Meur

4. 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 JY Le Meur

5. 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 JY Le Meur

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

7. Conference Management System Overview JY Le Meur

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

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

13. Contributions Sessions Conferences Categories What is a conference ! (II) > Call for Material > Material Submission • Lot of “objects”… Talks > Material Selection Categories contain many conferences that contain many sessions that contain many contributions that may contain many talks with many attached material… > Program Setup > User Registration > Web Site Management > Electronic Proceedings > Long term archive INDI ? Lot of processes JY Le Meur

14. The Indico Technology JY Le Meur

15. 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 JY Le Meur

16. persistence file repository web archives iConf/iM2 OAI conference management PDF authentication user management CDSware conference participants conference organisers iConference iM2 Architecture overview interface business system JY Le Meur

17. 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 JY Le Meur

18. 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 JY Le Meur

19. 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 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 JY Le Meur

21. More information • Production@CERN: http://indico.cern.ch • InDiCo Project: http://cern.ch/indico • CERN contact: mailto:indico-project@cern.ch JY Le Meur