[sakai2-tcc] Knowledge Base tool replacement for Online Help?
Jean-Francois Leveque
jean-francois.leveque at upmc.fr
Tue Mar 19 06:58:06 PDT 2013
On 15/03/2013 13:12, Roland Groen wrote:
> *
>
> 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.
I've done a few changes to make it build and not fail at Sakai startup.
The functional team hasn't done testing yet, AFAIK.
I could provide the changes with no further support.
> 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 <mailto: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 <http://www.edia.nl/>
>
>
> 2013/3/12 John Bush <john.bush at rsmart.com <mailto: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
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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
> <mailto:nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org>
> >> Skype: nealkdin
> >> AIM: ncaidin at aol.com <mailto:ncaidin at aol.com>
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