MONK Supercell call Sept 15, 2008

Present: Amit Kumar, Stan Ruecker, Martin Mueller, John Unsworth, Duane Searsmith, Stefan Sinclair, Catherine Plaisant, Steve Ramsay, Matt McKeon (IBM)

Amit discussed the new ticket system for the interface cell, which we'll use to track workbench bug fixes for the remainder of the project.

In recent interface cell news, Matt K has identified Carl Stahmer as a potential programmer who could help with the workbench.

In October, Amit hopes to gather the most recent code from Steve, Brian, and John N, so that it can be installed in Fedora. This will give us access to some XML for each work/workpart rather than necessitating going to the datastore for XML fragments: the return should be smaller. We can also easily move between adorned and unadorned, and integrate it with the metadata Martin and others have been producing.

Should we propose a next phase? We might ask, for instance, just for wrap-up funding. In any case, we would need to be able to show that we have solved some of the issues we raised in the original proposal. Scale, for instance, is something we've made some progress on.

Aside on scale: Sara's use case has roughly 4000 works, 1000 of which have been used as a training set.

Duane will have more work done soon on TeksTale.

Duane mentions that we may need bigger servers to accommodate the scale.

Martin points out that simple processes across hundreds of novels could help to orient a student trying to get a handle on the material.

Matt McKeon (IBM) called in late, having arrived from a traffic collision. We gave him a round of introductions and walked him through "Search by Example." We hope to use the ManyEyes applets in the workbench. We explained that we'd like to have their applet interact with our other tools. He is working on such a project. There is a release schedule within the next two weeks. He and Stefan and Amit will have another call this week.

1. Matt would like us to give feedback about Event's API.
2. Stefan and Matt are going to talk about the Javascript/Applet connections.