HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Indico: An Event Management Software (and more)

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Outline Project history Technical details Conference management Lecture/meeting management Planning/Archiving tool Indico: future trends and related collaborative tools

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Project History CDS Agenda: Created in 1999 following a request by ATLAS Stores timetable of events and related files At CERN:used by various projects, departments, experiments and committees Available as open-source under the GNU GPL and installed in several places worldwide:several places worldwide IN2P3, NiKHEF, DESY (ILC), ICTP, Elettra Trieste… Is used to create headers of many web pages (CERN, ATLAS, CMS…) Hosts mainly seminars, meetings and small conferences TOO LIMITED SCOPE

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Project History Indico (Integrated Digital Conference) European project: Partners: Italy: SISSA, University of Udine Holland: TNO TPD, University of Amsterdam CERN CDS Agenda served as basis for writing the user requirements of Indico In production at CERN since 2004 (first time use: CHEP’2004) Currently hosts >45 conferences Usage is growing fast Also available as open-source under the GNU GPL Current migration of CDS Agenda events to Indico

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Technical Details main development platform: Python runs on an Apache web application server using the Python module (mod_python) Uses the Zope Object Database (ZODB) for storing conferences metadata Object Oriented database implemented in Python The submitted files and archives are directly stored on the server’s file system HTML 4.0 XML + XSLt for timetable generation Interfaces: Web, OAI (Open Archive Initiative) protocol for metadata harvesting Tested on Windows, linux InDiCo is distributed under the GNU General Public License and is fully open source

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Technical Details Software architecture

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Conference Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Conference Management A complex event… humanlogical

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT …with a lot of processes Conference Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Conference Management Indico helps managing all these processes by providing: A customizable web portal for the conference Dedicated interfaces for all the actors of the conference Fine-granularity protection setup Flexible delegation of responsibilities File storage at all levels Various listings (contributions, authors, speakers, registrants…) and communication means. Export mechanisms (iCal, PDF, XML, Excel)

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Conference Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Conference Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Meeting Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Meeting Management Less actors, less processes: smaller complexity Same basis but simplified interfaces

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Meeting Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Meeting Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Lecture Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Lecture Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Lecture Management

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Planning/Archiving Tool One server – Many events of various sizes Hierarchical organisation: tree of categories to classify the events

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Planning/Archiving Tool Various handy temporal views: overviewcalendar

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Planning/Archiving Tool Long-term archival of the events metadata and related material Browsing capability Search engine: uses CDSware Export tools: creation of external web pages (ATLAS home page, LHCb…)

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Future Trends and Related Collaboration Tools Planned developement: Still a huge task list (> 6000 hours) Interface improvement program (based on the feedback from EGEE and new CERN users) Fulltext search Proceedings creation improvement Internationalization (in collaboration with IN2P3/EPFL) A goal for CERN: Organise the event 100% from Indico (avoiding searching for several tools) Closer integration with other conferencing services: room booking, resource booking, video-conferencing (VRVS, CERN MCUs), audioconference, seminar recording… Does not mean implement everything in Indico BUT regroup all useful tools in a unique and convenient location. Indico live usage: Collaborative features: instant messaging/chat and presence Webconferencing

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Future Trends and Related Collaboration Tools Making Indico aware of its environment Automatic download of ppt files on local conference room computer Example of a successful integration: SMAC (Smart Multimedia Archive for Conference)SMAC (Smart Multimedia Archive for Conference) In collaboration with EIF (Ecole d’Ingénieurs de Fribourg) Fully automated system for recording lectures, creating web lectures (SMIL) Local recording, centralised processing, several conference rooms can be served Start/Stop recording from Indico, then the web lecture is directly attached to the Indico event. ROOM 1 ROOM 2 ROOM 3 Indico Server SMAC Central Server smac controller smac controller smac controller request Multimedia streams Web lecture object Web lecture object manager user

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT Future Trends and Related Collaboration Tools Example of a SMAC web lecture

HEPiX Fall Meeting 2005 Thomas Baron – CERN – IT QUESTIONS Project web page: Contact: