From Tuesday 17 to Thursday 19 October CNR – ISTI hosted in Pisa the Technical Workshop on PARTHENOS service integration. The workshop was based on a typical scenario where a project consortium member has to integrate specialized services (web services or web applications) with the infrastructure and expose them through a custom VRE to the user community.
The D4Science developers were available on site to illustrate the features of the platform, answer to questions and help with service coding.
The workshop
Twenty participants from different institutions, all directly involved in the project or as seconded partner, took part in the workshop, which was divided into four main sessions. During the first one (Tuesday afternoon), Daan Broeder and Matej Durco opened the meeting illustrating the objectives and expectations of the workshop, followed by an introduction of the D4Science infrastructure by Pasquale Pagano and Massimiliano Assante. Afterwards, the D4Science representatives gave presentations about the implementation of services and custom methods and algorithms for data miners; cloud data storage, notifications, messaging and social networking services APIs, and information system and registry APIs.
In the second session (Wednesday morning), participants briefly presented the following community services or applications planned for integration:
- DANS Wizard application: https://goo.gl/NvMFEU
- CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard: https://goo.gl/bUhDgm
- CLARIN Multi-Tier Annotation Search (MTAS) Search: https://goo.gl/u4Zyjx
- SISMEL Reference Resources Integration platform (RubRIcA): https://goo.gl/S8wYnA
- INRIA STANDARDIZATION SURVIVAL KIT (SSK): not presented though discussed
- ISTI-VisualComputingLab ARIADNE Visual Media service: http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/3dhop/
- CLARIN RTFReader: https://goo.gl/NywXLV
- ACDH NLP and semantic enrichment of textual data (NERLiX): https://goo.gl/HwsshU
- CLARIN/LINDAT UDPipe annotating tool: https://goo.gl/fr6E9J
The first two sessions were recorded by Vicky Garnett, directly involved in PARTHENOS’ Skills, Professional Development and Advancement Programme (WP7).
Starting from Wednesday afternoon and depending on the presented service integration needs, the workshop participants and the D4Science representatives gathered in three Thematic Clusters, named as follows:
- INTEGRATION MODALITIES (with D4S) CLUSTER
- DANS Wizard application
- CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard
- CLARIN Multi-Tier Annotation Search (MTAS) Search
- INRIA STANDARDIZATION SURVIVAL KIT (SSK)
- ACDH NLP and semantic enrichment of textual data (NERLiX)
- D4S DATA MINER CLUSTER
- CLARIN/LINDAT UDPipe annotating tool
- SISMEL Reference Resources Integration platform (RubRIcA)
- CLARIN RTFReader
- D4S WORKSPACE/MESSAGING/NOTIFICATION CLUSTER
- ISTI-VisualComputingLab ARIADNE Visual Media service
During this hands-on session participants were involved in discussing, testing and deploying real community service solutions.
The workshop concluded with a wrap-up session, in which the main outcomes of the clusters’ discussions were exposed and summarized and next steps presented and discussed.
Outcomes and Next Steps
A new VRE has been created to support the service integration, namely PARTHENOS_LAB. PARTHENOS_LAB VRE is available on the Parthenos Gateway at URL: https://parthenos.d4science.org; the workshop participants registered to it. Moreover, an issue tracker is now in place to track the integration activities: https://support.d4science.org/projects/parthenos_lab
The three groups have defined a number of integration patterns and agreed on a number of actions for each of the presented community services. The integration of the services should be all pursued except for the Multi-Tier Annotation Search (MTAS) case, regarding a broader use case: (Very Large) corpora indexing, consisting more about implementation rather than integration of a Community service. In this regard, the D4Science Team proposed a technical assessment, while CLARIN Team proposed to do an assessment to evaluate if this (Very Large) corpora indexing service would be of interest to the CLARIN community.
The community service integration in D4Science will be further discussed at the next PARTHENOS WP2-5-6 joint meeting in November 2017.