[Geo4All] setup OSGeo wiki for Open Source Report Card forms (etc)

[Tom Roche]

[endnotes follow .sig. ]

summary: overview of A Way To Do This, details on the OSGeo Trac ticket[1]. Work proceeds off-wiki for reasons described on the ticket: basically to avoid problems with current wiki operations while this work is pre-beta, and to allow wiki security upgrade (for which I'll do a separate ticket). I'm not yet sure if folks who are *not* currently "reporters" (i.e., ticket creators) or "owners" (ticket assignees) of an OSGeo ticket can {subscribe to, "watch"} it: ISTM this depends on Trac upgrade, but ICBW. (I'll pursue off-thread and report back.)

details:

I've started work on the OSGeo Trac ticket[1]: please see details there, and also put comments and counter-proposals there (rather than on this list). But, just for an update ...

Suchith Anand[2]
>> The main information we need are

>> *   Name of Organisation
>> *   Name of Contact person
>> *   Email of contact person
>> *   Website
>> *   Country
>> *   Year
>> *   Which open source projects have your organisation contributed with details/links etc
>> *   Which open source codesprints, conferences, events have you supported this year
>> *   Plans for next year

Suchith Anand[3] (rearranged)
> The input has to a simple form, (max 10 fields)

Note the following can also be extracted (by those with a bit of informatic background :-) from the first comment on the ticket[1].

>From the Page Forms API[4], and from what I'm guessing folks will want to query (more on that in direct communication, off-thread), ISTM (and ICBW, so feel free to put your counters on the ticket!) the better way to do this will be 4 templates/forms, each with a small number of editable fields. Remember, the backing store is an SQL DB, so the usual normalization[5] principles apply: rather than having One Big form/table with lots of data duplication, ya wanna have separate forms/tables for each kind of thing. IIUC, Dr Anand gives 4 important semantics: organization (I'll use term='org' to avoid the Brit/US spelling annoyance :-), OSRC, event, and project.

An org maintainer's usecase should then be composed of the following sorts of tasks. These tasks can be done in various orders after the first, since each org's name will be a primary or foreign key for much of the following data ops.

1. Fill out the Org template with your org's details: org name (primary key), contact person name and email, etc. Save that (after creating or editing), and the data becomes available via its own URI (more below), which you can edit or query in your browser or via SMW commandline API (more below). Links to any OSRCs you create "aggregate" onto the org page by the SMW query API.

*  Each time you do an 'OS event' (i.e., any event you want to see on your OSRC), fill out an Event template with your org name (foreign key), event name, start and end dates, description, etc. Save that, and the data becomes available as/via the page/URI for that event.

*  Every time you do an 'OS project' (i.e., any project you want to see on your OSRC), fill out a Project template with your org name (foreign key), project name, year, description, etc. Save that, and the data becomes available as/via the page/URI for that project.

*  When you want to report an OSRC for a given year, fill out an OSRC template with the appropriate org name (foreign key), year, and plan. Whenever you save that, ... you guessed :-) Links to events and projects aggregate onto the OSRC page/URI by the SMW query API.

OSGeo's use cases will (and here I'm just guessing, will pursue off-thread) include the following sorts of queries:

1. OSRCs by org: available via the org's URI, either in browser or via the same query API that the page uses to auto-query.
2. OSRCs by year: will do a separate query page, just fill-in year (or use API for same)
3. OSRC for org + year: also via the org's page/URI
4. OS events for org + year: available via the OSRC's page/URI
5. OS events for year: will do a separate query page, just fill-in year (or use API for same)
6. OS projects for org + year: available via the OSRC's page/URI
7. OS projects for year: will do a separate query page, just fill-in year (or use API for same)
8. OSRC plans for org + year: available via the OSRC's page/URI

> the url of which can be send to everyone

Yep, the beauty of the Forms API[4] is that, once you save data (e.g., by input to a template page), it becomes available by URI, either via the browser or commandline API (which can also be embedded in pages to provide functionality like aggregation).

more in the ticket[1], Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1]: https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/1817
[2]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-November/003291.html
[3]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-November/003300.html
[4]: page 3/3 of http://postable.net/smwqr/smw-quick-reference.pdf . Note that this PDF still uses the old extension name='Semantic Forms' rather than 'Page Forms', but IIUC the API is updated.
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization