ABI Meeting minutes 2008-11-05

Present: Jonna Terkildsen, Randall Britten, Tommy Yu, Andrew Miller, Catherine Lloyd, Justin Marsh, James Lawson, Poul Nielsen, Michael Backhaus, Dougal Cowan
Apologies: Peter Hunter

Last week's action items:


1) James to draft a document detailing the decision making process, based on the tracker and the discussions.
  • James is still working on this and is in communication with interested parties.

This week's agenda:

1) Metadata 1.0 spec decision process compared to main spec decision process
  • James raised the question of whether there should be different panels for different tasks.
  • James raised the question of how panels are chosen; who chooses them.
  • Poul discussed the pros and cons of independent panels for each area; panels can be made up of experts, but lack of overlap could lead to fragmentation of goals.
  • Andrew suggested we could use existing decision making models; IETF and W3C examples.

oversight/working groups

  • Poul likes this model.
  • James will update and distribute the decision making document.
  • There was extensive discussion on how to appoint the oversight or steering panel:
      • Vote to appoint?
      • Who gets to vote; who decides who gets to vote?
  • Poul put forward the idea that the current committee form the oversight group, and that ad-hoc committees are formed as working groups on different areas.
  • Randall thought that perhaps the current group represents a working group on CellML core spec, and that the group may need to be changed to reflect a more balanced outlook.
  • Andrew raised the question of how does the oversight group choose who replaces members who leave?
  • Randall thought that currently there is no need to formalize this process, that decisions can be made when the time comes.
  • Andrew's opinion is that a clear process reduces uncertainty and reduces the number of recurring discussions.
  • Poul stated that he thinks the two level structure is important.
Action item 1.) James to draft an email on this topic to the community.

2) Reminder: Deadline for IUPS abstracts is the 10th December
  • Catherine said that Peter is keen for everyone who wants to go to go.
  • There was discussion on who is eligible for a grant; this needs to be investigated.
  • James said that abstracts should probably be on the subject of work between now and the middle of 2009.

3) Proposal: Abhishek moderation flag cleared for team cellmll mailing list
  • Catherine said that Abhishek is no longer interested in this.
  • James has added Abhishek's ideas to the roadmap.
  • Poul will talk to Abhishek about keeping in touch with Sarala.
  • Andrew will clear the moderation flag on team@cellml, now that Abhishek knows the purposes of the different lists.

4) CellML Specs - update
  • Nothing on the core spec.
  • James has been looking at the Dublin Core tutorials on how to build constrained vocabularies etc.
  • Dublin Core seems to have broadened to include: citations, keywords, etc.
  • Randall brought up prioritizing the graphing and simulation metadata to bring PCEnv up to date.
  • Andrew can work on bringing PCEnv up to date on these metadata.

5) PCEnv development - update
  • Andrew has finished the RDF API; ready to move the metadata handling in PCEnv to the CellML API.
  • Ready to improve the graphing and simulation metadata.
  • Randall mentioned Andre is very keen to prioritize the Java wrappers.  Can this be balanced with the metadata spec?
  • Poul would put the Java wrappers at higher priority.
Action item 2.) Randall to email developers (?)

  • Justin is working on the Mac OS X build, using the XUL SDK to avoid building Mozilla on Mac.
  • Randall mentioned that this is to pre-empt Firefox 3.1
  • Catherine mentioned that Frank Sachse is keen to see a Mac version of PCEnv for teaching purposes.

6) CellML API - update
  • Andrew has been fixing minor bugs.
  • The RDF API is complete.

7) Website redesign - update
  • Catherine described the good feedback on the wireframes.
  • Gareth is going send out new versions of the wireframes, (with changes according to the feedback so far) to the community for further feedback.
  • Content update needs to be done.
  • Gareth to select some free stylesheets or skins for Plone, which we can edit to suit our needs.
  • We may decide to get some professional opinions from a designer on our in-house design.
  • The deadline for the new site is the workshop.

8) Repository contributions - update
  • Catherine curated the Vaseghi  model.
  • Catherine, Randall, Justin, James and Andrew have been working on the Pasek 2006 model.

9) PMR2 development - update
  • Tommy has been building tests; Plone objects passed these tests so far.
  • Tommy has been working on putting Plone and Mercurial together.
  • Catherine asked; is checking for broken links is worth it?
  • Randall said that all PMR1 content will be migrated to PMR2 so broken links do need fixing.
  • Andrew mentioned the existence of a script for finding broken links.
Action item 3.) Tommy to find and execute a script to find broken links.
  • Catherine would like a simple "edit documentation and re-expose" workflow for PMR2.

10) Updates or additional items
  • Catherine asked Andrew about progress on the SBML to CellML prototype; there has been no further work on this.
  • James asked about Matt's Plone 3 "proposals" software, for software centre.
  • Randall suggested continuing to use the tracker for proposals.