Saturday, July 11, 2015

Working on user requirements extraction for the OpenMinTeD project

My colleague Nikos is currently presenting the work that we have done regarding the TAPipedia conceptual design (a report of more than 130 pages so far) and aims to collect feedback that will allow us to work on the final revisions of the document. This is a task that both of us have dedicated a lot of time, effort and creative thinking on, so I am really anxious to receiving the feedback collected during the TAP Experts Group meeting that he is attending these days in Rome, Italy.

In the meantime, I got involved in the preparation of the guidelines for the organization and implementation of events that aim to collect user requirements for the text- and data-mining applications for the OpenMinTeD H2020 project. The project aims to "enable the creation of an infrastructure that fosters and facilitates the use of text and data mining technologies in the scientific publications world and beyond, by both application domain users and text-mining experts". Through a dedicated set of events and using a specific methodology, the project aims to collect requirements from specific types of stakeholders that will allow it to better meet their needs through the development of tools and infrastructure. It includes a generic methodology to be adapted for each individual case (event), a number of templates (e.g. agenda, PPTs, evaluation form etc.) and tips on the successful implementation of such an event. I have some previous experience on the development of such guidelines and methodology, I have support from the rest of the team (whenever and wherever needed) and I really like working on such things, so I am working on that full speed!

The project uses a Redmine installation for various purposes, including management of tasks and documentation of activities like the aforementioned one. According to Wikipedia, "Redmine is a free and open source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It allows users to manage multiple projects and associated subprojects. It features per project wikis".

So far, I have been working directly on the wiki-like interface of Redmine for publishing the guidelines. It has a set of wiki features that allow the organization of text in sections and sub-sections, making it easy to create a complex document. I have to admit that I miss some of the typical wiki functionalities (like the automatically created ToC at the beginning of the page) but still I found Redmine really easy to use. Unfortunately I am only using a specific set of functionalities of the tool, which seems to be diverse and efficient in what it aims to allow users to achieve.

The guidelines are expected to be ready by the end of this month and I hope that they will be publicly available so that I can share a link to them! :-)