Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Jon Phillips <jon AT rejon.org>]

Excellent, this looks like a thorough proposal...please submit!

Jon

On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 03:28 -0300, Alan Kelon Oliveira de Moraes wrote:
> Hy, folks!
> 
> Here goes my draft proposal.
> 
> Including RDFa support in Nutch: Updating the CCNutch plug-in
> =============================================================
> 
> Proponent: Alan Kelon Oliveira de Moraes <akom at cin.ufpe.br>
> 
> Summary
>       Project proposal
>               Development process
>               Deliverables
>               Major milestones
>       Past open source projects
>       Resume
>       Final self-advocacy
> 
> Project proposal
> ================
> 
> RDFa is a syntax that expresses semantic in structured data using a set
> of elements and attributes that embed RDF in HTML, such as a license on
> a document or a photo's creator name, camera setting information and its
>  resolution.
> 
> Nutch is an open-source search engine that uses Lucene for searching the
> Web   or in a customized form for an intranet or subset of the Web.
> CCNutch is a plug-in for Nutch to search Creative Commons content.
> Currently, CCNutch indexes only text documents and do not support very
> well RDFa. The inclusion of RDFa could be a great improvement because
> we could easily index image, audio and video through their RDFa meta-data
> and search them, increasing our range of searchable artifacts available
> under creative licenses, so enabling RDFa parsing and indexing in (CC)Nutch
> should enable better structured search and sharing of artifacts.
> 
> I played only a few days with Nutch and CCNuth code base. I admit that it
> was not enough to be an expert on them, but they do not seem to be very
> hard to extend. The first step is to add RDFa content into Nutch indexes.
> I think I could use – and extend whenever necessary – the RDFa extractor
> (http://sw-app.org/dev/RDFaExtractorCore.java), a Java implementation to
> extract RDFa information, and drop the current parsing implementation of
> CCNuth. I need more research to better evaluate this choice. Elias Torres
> developed an RDFa parser and its test suit
> (http://dev.torrez.us/public/2006/rdfa/)
> for Python language which may help too. These two implementations will
> speed up the things and learning of RDFa technology.
> 
> The second step is to add specific query facilities to the web interface
> to enable searching of multimedia content by kind (images, audio and/or
> video)
> with different licensing restrictions.
> 
> Development process
> -------------------
> 
> I will follow the core of Hukarz Software Development Process, a process
> to Open Source Software Factories (see my resume below) proposed in my M.Sc.
> degree. Hukarz is based on Scrum, so it is iterative and incremental like
> most OSS projects, and there are some additions to pure Scrum, such as the
> use of Software Configuration Management and Project Management disciplines.
> Each sprint – an iteration in Scrum jargon – is a small increment of the
> software that contains a little of planning at its beginning, the 
> development
> itself (design, coding and testing), and a release at its end.  Each spring
> will have 15 days to better track progress, to share and to discuss the
> software evolution with the community. Of course, I will host the project
> on code@google from the beginning, thus the code will be readily available
> for review.
> 
> To further track my progress, I plan to write a little project status to
> cc-devel mailing list on a weekly basis as well to contact the assigned
> mentor more frequently. I will also set up a blog to write about random
> thoughts, progress, and difficulties faced during the development.
> 
> Deliverables
> ------------
> 
> These are the artifacts I will deliver during the summer:
>     * Requirements document: details, in a high-level abstraction level,
>       the features to be implemented;
>     * Architecture document: contains the technical solution to implement
>       the defined requirements;
>     * Project plan: a high-level plan of the development, including a
>       scheduling (see Major milestones below) and risk assessment;
>     * Sprint plan: for each iteration, a 15-day planning identifying the
>       week milestones will be made to guide the implementation;
>     * Update the CCNutch wiki page 
> (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcNutch);
>     * A Patch to Nutch community with RDFa support in CCNutch plugin;
>     * A Patch to RDFa extractor if necessary.
> 
> Major milestones
> ----------------
> 
>     * March 26: Project proposal;
>     * April 11: Google announces the list of accepted student projects;
> 
>     * April 19: Draft version of requirements document (this document will
>       be updated when necessary);
>     * April 27: Draft version of Architecture document (this document will
>       be updated when necessary);
> 
>     * May 28: Project and mentoring start;
>     * June 11: 1st release:
>         * Requirements document;
>         * Architecture document;
>         * Prototype for proof-of-concepts;
>     * June 25: 2nd release:
>         * Alpha release 1: indexing RDFa documents;
>     * July 9: 3rd release:
>         * Alpha release 2: finish of RDFa indexing and start of RDFa
> searching;
>         * Google’s mid-term checkpoint;
> 
>     * July 16:
>         * Mid-term mentor evaluation deadline;
>         * Revised documentation (really close to final I expect);
>     * July 23: 4th release:
>         * Beta release 1: Search RDFa indexes;
>     * August 6: 5th release:
>         * Beta release 2;
>     * August 20: 6th (final) release;
>         * Google’s final checkpoint;
> 
>     * August 31: Final mentor evaluation deadline.
> 
> 
> ... To see my experience with Open Source, please check
> http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~akom/soc07-proposal/soc07-proposal.txt (or
> http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~akom/soc07-proposal/soc07-proposal.pdf for a fancy
> version ;)
> 
> 
> Best regards,
-- 
Jon Phillips

San Francisco, CA
USA PH 510.499.0894
jon AT rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

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