[sakai2-tcc] [Building Sakai] Knowledge Base tool replacement for Online Help?

Fri Mar 15 05:12:40 PDT 2013

*

Hi All,

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. Let me go through them by
topic.

Sakai > 2.7: I know that Jean Francois Leveque did some work migrating the
tool to 2.9, I'm still awaiting feedback, but I'm quite sure he got it
running on 2.9. The only thing that could be revisited is the way the tool
installs itself over the existing help system. Maybe that can be done more
elegant in Sakai > 2.7.

Import / export: The KB tool lacks the ability to import the existing help
content because the University of Amsterdam wasn't much interested in using
the this content. Instead they started off with the content from CSU.
Unfortunately for the international Sakai community they translated it to
Dutch. From the content perspective, the import does does not have to be
complicated. The KB tool was inspired by the 3akai development, and has a
REST interface. The specific metadata needs to be added manually.

Searching, SOLR and ES. The original design of the KB is based on tables in
the Sakai database and an embedded SOLR engine. The motivation for using
database tables is purely because SOLR is not a database. We did not want
to complicate the Sakai infrastructure and therefore used an embedded SOLR
instance. I’m quite excited about Sakai getting a search based on SOLR/ES.
My personal preference would be ES because it supports multi tenancy and
doesn’t require the schema to be predefined. We’ve got experience with
solr, rebuilding the index when the schema changes is challenging. ES being
multi tenant would be great for supporting the KB tool, because a new index
for the KB tool can be created on the fly. With SOLR one would have to drop
in a new core to get a own index. For the record, I do think a central
Sakai KB service would be the best solution.*

Met vriendelijke groeten / With kind regards,

--
*Roland M.S. Groen*
roland at edia.nl

*Edia* - Educatie Technologie
Egelantiersstraat 141-143 | 1015 RA Amsterdam
*T* 020 716 36 12 | *F* 020 716 36 13 | *M* 06 2423 09 06 | www.edia.nl

2013/3/12 John Bush <john.bush at rsmart.com>

> I assume we are talking about what's in:
> https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/edia/knowledgebase/trunk/ ?
>
> I don't think converting the search stuff would be very hard.  Its a
> bit of a leaky abstraction as they are returning solr QueryResponse
> objects.  But other than that, its just index and search stuff.  You
> would just create a new ES index for help, and it would be pretty
> straightforward.  Probably few days of dev I'd say (for me anyway).
>
> On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Matthew Jones <matthew at longsight.com>
> wrote:
> > Short of retyping everything, I don't think there was any path that
> didn't
> > require a code conversion. The current KB code isn't compatible with
> > anything > 2.7.1 either, so it doesn't compile OOTB without some
> > modifications
> >
> > The current help system uses XML definition files and separate i18n html
> > files. So you'd have to write something that would go through all these
> xml
> > files and either dump it into the database or use the api to add new
> items.
> >
> > Some other limitations
> > - There's no way to import/export other that a database dump (which kind
> of
> > ties into this issue above) It seems like you'd really want to be able to
> > import help for a new tool, especially stuff like contrib tools, ideally
> > automatically. I'm guessing it would work with the current xml and html
> > files and autodiscover/import them if they're new (not previously added
> > modified, like if you just added evaluation or something)
> > - There's no support for i18n, that's on the future directions. It seems
> > like you'd need a separate column to indicate the language and some more
> > work to display only files in a particular language
> > - It looks like it uses SOLR (one per instance). The current path in
> Sakai
> > seems to use Elastic Search with possible optional setup for SOLR, so
> this
> > search would probably need to be rewritten
> >
> > I don't know the effort required to get any of that fixed/implemented.
> Maybe
> > a week for the import/export/current help compatibility? A few days for
> > i18n? Not sure on search.
> >
> > This solution would also have the problem of the help files getting out
> of
> > date between releases, even if we kept a central source up-to-date.
> People
> > would either have to wipe their changes from the db and re-apply their
> > customizations or update based on some diff we put out. This is a problem
> > with the current system too though.
> >
> > The other alternative to this would be centrally hosted help, like one
> that
> > Sam wrote in Drupal. I think he had some mechanism for importing already,
> > not sure about export. I don't think it has any support for i18n other
> than
> > running multiple sites and it does do searching.
> >
> > I'm not sure what would be better/faster for the community. I'm sure some
> > people would want to take what's there and have a way to customize it in
> > either case which could be an advantage for a built in tool like this if
> > these issues were addressed.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Steve Swinsburg <
> steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> This looks really good. Any idea of the level of effort required to get
> >> existing help into this system?
> >>
> >> cheers,
> >> Steve
> >>
> >>
> >> On 08/03/2013, at 3:36 AM, Neal Caidin <nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi All,
> >>
> >> Edia has created a nice summary of their Knowledge Base tool at
> >>
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/HELP/Future+plans+for+The+Knowledge+Base+Tool
> >>
> >> This tool has potential for replacing the existing Sakai context
> sensitive
> >> Help system. The current online help system is not currently on a
> >> sustainable path and we need to figure out how to either update it or
> find a
> >> replacement.
> >>
> >> Take a look and see what you think.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Neal Caidin
> >>
> >> Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
> >> nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
> >> Skype: nealkdin
> >> AIM: ncaidin at aol.com
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
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> >>
> >>
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> >
> >
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>
>
> --
> John Bush
> 602-490-0470
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