ABI CellML Meeting Minutes, 5th October 2011

Present: Dougal Cowan, Alan Garny, David "Andre" Nickerson, Randall Britten, Andrew Miller, Tommy Yu

Apologies: Poul Nielsen

Last week's action items:

Action item 1: Dougal - email the list of nominees to start discussion on duration of election.

  • Done. The election will conclude on Friday 7th October.

This week's agenda:

1) CellML website front page

Discussion:

  • Randall: a news item for PMR2 0.4 is required.

Action item 1: Tommy - announce PMR2 0.4, then Dougal to put up the news item.

2) CellML API - update

Progress:

  • Andrew: planned to refactor how Python code works, using a generics interface.
  • There was a discussion about this new generics approach to language bindings.
  • Andrew: have been looking through comments on the API documentation. Some of these were due to documentation not being uploaded yet, or broken renderings.

Discussion:

  • Andre: this should be discussed on the mailing list, as it is a fairly major change.
  • Alan: it seems that the Python bindings are not Python-like, and hard to use. C++ bindings are very cumbersome to use.
  • There was a discussion about C++ bindings, options for improving language bindings, etc. Options include changing to SWIG or Thrift, or re-implementing the API for each language. 
  • Randall: maybe we should look at working on better more native C++ bindings to ease OpenCOR developement.

3) CellML core specs - update

  • No update.

4) PMR2)  development - update

Progress:

  • Tommy: 0.4 was released on Monday night. Some minor refactoring, and work to get the certificates up and working. There are some problems with the certificates due to Red Hat version. 
  • Tommy: trying to get more familiar with the CellML API.
  • Alan: OpenCOR now has support for JSON, and the repository plugin can get a list of models, extract the name and URI, etc. The REST/JSON approach seems to work well for providing webservices.

Discussion:

  • Randall: we need to look at scoping PMR2 0.5.

Action item 2: Dougal - add PMR2 planning item to next meeting agenda.

  • There was a discussion about PMR2 in context of the ABI software integration project.
  • There was an extensive discussion about the focus of PMR2 development for 0.5
  • There was a discussion about future directions for SED-ML support, OpenCell session files, exposures etc, both in OpenCOR and PMR2.
  • There was a very extensive discussion about OpenCOR and PMR2 features for displaying, simulating, exploring, editing, and annotating models.

5) Repository contributions - update

  • No update.