Hello again, sorry about the big delay between posts, things have been pretty busy here recently and remembering to write this often slips my mind.

We’ve released our first release candidate for 2.85 so please try it out and let us know if there are any issues. You can find it at http://www.greenstone.org/snapshots.

The front-end for the Document Basket (formerly the Document Maker) is looking really good now, sections can be added, moved around, duplicated and removed. The text of each section can also be easily edited thanks to Brook Novak’s Seaweed (Seamless Web Editing) technology which was developed here at the University of Waikato. For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it basically allows you to click text on a web page and start editing it right there without the need for any complicated text boxes/buttons etc. Very cool.

We have yet to connect the front-end Document Basket interface to the back-end yet and we are still working on features such as undo, so that is what I will be working on this for this week.

It’s been about 4 weeks since I wrote an entry. In the meantime we’ve been tidying up the last of the To Do list items for the upcoming GS2 release and several of the To Do list items for the GS3 release. Sam is now hard working on the GS3 interface alongside his other work on the Document Maker. It now looks like GS3 may be released separately, after GS2.

Some of the more involved things that required doing were:

• testing OAI (dc.Resource Identifier issues) and downloading over OAI
• The extracted embedded metadata, ex.*.metadata (e.g. ex.dc.* prefixes), needed to be handled different from ex.metadata. This required some changes in various files and a lot of testing.
• Conflicts between EmbeddedMetadataPlugin and some of the existing Plugins in the pipeline (OAI, DSpace, PDF plugins). Fortunately, Dr Bainbridge came up with fixes. After some testing, the known problems with these plugins no longer exist. With the tutorials we will continue to investigate how well other plugins interact with the EmbeddedMetaPlugin.
• The OAI validator at openarchives now had a test where GS2’s OAI server failed and a different one where the GS3 OAI server failed. These have been fixed up.
• The GS3 installer needed to have an admin page, like the GS2 installer does, where the user can enable admin pages and provide a password.
• wvware.pl is a new intermediary script to launch wvware in its own particular environment. This script is necessary in order for wvware’s required environment not to be set globally (thereby tampering with Linux’ windowing/GUI libraries)
• At the moment, after John Rose’s request, we’re in the process of merging the two server configuration files (glisite.cfg and llssite.cfg), so we can have just one, with some properties qualified by a “gli” prefix. The Server.jar code, the GS2 C++ code, the startup scripts and config files have been sufficiently modified to work with the work-in-progress on the GLI code, while still working with the stable GLI. Changing the GLI code was tricky two years ago, and made the code’s behaviour rather  complex. Now that I’m in the process of testing the latest overhaul to it, the changes I’ve just made to what was stable are still very buggy and reproducing the bugs takes some time. Fortunately, without the changes to the GLI code, everything else committed is able to work as accurately as before, which is fortunate since if I break anything, it will be just the LocalLibraryServer.java GLI code that once committed needs to be reverted.
• The above task has now been completely resolved, and changes committed after being tested thoroughly on both Windows and Linux.

Minor issues also kept popping up over the last month.

• There was a Z3950 “issue”that sidetracked me and which turned out not to be an issue after all: The Library of Congress’ Z3950 address seems to return SRU data. The fix is simply for the user to use the right module of the download pane.
• A bug in starting and stopping GS3 via GLI on windows
• One Greenstone member encountered a unicode issue that I wasn’t able to reproduce after initial investigations.
• Minor but frustrating bugs with the GLI for GS3 have been resolved (an extra nested <format/> tag appearing when all format statements have been removed, and the preview button activating itself when editing format statements in an unbuilt GS3 collection)
• Fixed GS3’s way of handling the port in the GSI application, so that it is no longer arbitrarily modified. The Do Not Modify port is still available.
• Some requests on the mailing list like porting indexed databases from one GS2 version to the next, since changes had been made to the name of an ex.metadata

Since the last time I wrote I have mostly been continuing work on the Document Maker. The back-end (the part that does all the hard work) is around 80% complete and is ready enough for me to start working more on the front-end (the part that makes the back-end easier to use).

I have also been tidying up some of the Format Manager work that the other Sam did before he left. He had modified the JQuery UI source code so that it allowed multiple nested lists of items (basically lists inside lists, which the original code did not allow for). The only problem with this approach (directly modifying the source code) is that it does not allow us to easily upgrade our version of JQuery UI in the future. To remedy this problem we downloaded the original JQuery UI source code and worked out what parts of the modified code we needed to keep. We then took these parts and put them into a different Javascript file and used the prototype functionality of Javascript to make sure that the modified code would overwrite the original code.

We originally tried contacting the JQuery UI developers to see if we could get Sam’s changes included in the official source code but they responded saying that this new list-inside-list functionality was outside the scope of what the original lists were intended for.

The Format Manager is still very much a work in progress and, although it will be included in the next release of Greenstone 3, we will be still recommending that people make their format statement modifications through editing the collectionConfig.xml file at this point.

Since my last post I have been working hard on the new Document Maker functionality that is planned for a future version of Greenstone. So far I have implemented the ability to create new documents, create new document sections, delete documents, delete document sections, copy documents, turn a document into a section of another document, turn a section of a document into a document and the ability to copy a section from one document into another document. Also planned is the ability to move documents and sections (basically the same as the copying operations except the original document or section is deleted afterwards); the ability to merge sections together or to split them apart; various document manipulations such as the ability to get and set metadata and the ability to get and set the document content.

The plan is that this Document Maker functionality will be presented to the users via a web interface, allowing users to modify their documents on the fly. We imagine that this functionality will be very useful to people who want to be able to create organised collections out of large, unorganised sets of text and images. One such example of this is the Pei Jones collection which is made up of many individual letters, photos and articles that have been OCRed.

Last week started off with requiring fixes to a bug introduced during recent GS3 code changes: suddenly metadata and titles were no longer being retrieved for normal search and browse operations. Then Sam’s recent improvement to GS3’s GLI by starting the tomcat server upon GLI startup was expanded to also stop the tomcat server on GLI’s exit.

Then it was time to move back to GS3 XSLT files once more. Recently, changes were made to GS3’s old standard skin (gs3library) XSLT files, so that the features exhibited in the DSpace Tutorial would work for GS3 as well. These changes needed to still be ported over to the new standard skin for GS3, currently called “oran” (its servlet is called “dev”). However, in trying to make sense of how to do this, it was discovered that the default dev servlet was not set to use Sam’s excellent default GS3 interface for dev. Because GS3’s format features need to be customisable, having any format statements in a collection’s configuration file would bypass Sam’s interface to show up a default one. However, this default one was not working at this stage. This was therefore fixed up to get back some rudimentary behaviour not unlike what GS2’s interface offers for hierarchical browsing and search results. To use Sam’s interface, all users would need to do is use GLI to delete any format statements in a collection’s config file.

In looking into this matter, a further minor bug was discovered in classifier.xsl that was also fixed.

Porting the GS3 changes made for DSpace tutorial into the new default skin later had to be continued later, since there was some incomplete work awaiting finishing: the week ended with continuing work to do with working with embedded metadata (such as of the form ex.dc.*).

It’s been a while since I last wrote, so I’ll fill you all in on what has been happening.

We have been working fairly solidly on some improvements for 2.85. One thing we have been aiming to do is improve the use of PDF files with complex embedded metadata. We have added several options to the EmbeddedMetadataPlugin that allows more advanced manipulation of metadata arrays (metadata values that have multiple entries like ex.PDF.Keywords).

We have also fixed several issues that arise when 2 similar documents (for example if two identical PDF documents are put into Greenstone but have different embedded metadata) are put into Greenstone.

In other news, we are currently taking another look at the way we encode PDF files. As some of you may know we introduced the PDFBox extension along with 2.84 as a way of converting the latest PDF formats to HTML (pdftohtml only allows conversion of the earlier PDF formats). PDFBox works well except that it does not also get the images out of the PDF like pdftohtml does, it also is fairly large which is why we need to keep it as an extension rather than bundle it with Greenstone. Unfortunately for us, the pdftohtml utility has not been in active development for quite a while now so it has not been upgraded to deal with the more recent PDF versions. However the Xpdf library that pdftohtml uses is still in active development so we have been exploring the viability of upgrading pdftohtml ourselves.

Alongside this I am continuing to work on the Document Maker for Greenstone 3. I have a skeleton of the program in place and have starting filling it out.

• Week starting 11 July: Closed ticket 770 to do with multiple pieces of metadata for the same metadata name in GS3. GS3 was previously not consulting the mdoffset field in the index database to work out which of multiple assigned metadata values to display for a particular metadata field. When browsing on that metadata field, it used to display only the first each time, but now displays all values in turn.
• For the rest of that week and the start of the week thereafter, worked on some items discovered by John Rose and Luigi. They found a bug in the GS2 OAI server that manifested when a GS2 client tried to download docs from it over OAI. The bug had to do with an incorrect URL being generated for the dc.Resource Identifier field. They also requested a minor improvement to the button layout in GLI’s OAI download panel and needed some clarifications on the GS2 OAI server’s behaviour.
• Continuing on in the week of 18 July: On GLI startup, an information dialog box will show up if the user does not have the PDFBox extension installed (telling them how to get it if they want newer PDF versions processed). A dialog will also appear on startup if the user’s collect home was set to be somewhere outside its default location inside the GS2 installation.
• In implementing the last, a bug was discovered that had been introduced when implementing the reset-gsdlhome target of the gsicontrol script. The bug interfered with the proper behaviour of setting and loading a custom collecthome when using GLI. It’s now been fixed in such a manner that there’s the added advantage that the intensive operations of the reset-gsdlhome task will not be carried out anymore each time the GS2-server is launched. Instead, the relocation-specific operations are only performed when GSDLHOME has in fact changed since the previous time the GS2-server was launched.
• The pdfbox-app.jar executable file was changed again: it was returned to being the plain, official 1.5.0 release, without the Greenstone-specific changes regarding the line-separator that had thereafter been committed. Instead, the line.separator is now set as a command-line property when launching the pdfbox-app.jar, as suggested by Dr. Bainbridge, since it was no more than a Java System property that needed to be adjusted for GS’ customisation of PDFBox anyway.
• Changes have been made to modelcol’s config.cfg (and related changes in runtime-src) to deal with embedded metadata, so that it will now handle the “ex.” prefix of metadata already qualified by a set name, such as ex.dc.something. Further changes were made to runtime-src’s code to not always remove the ex. prefix, since this should be retained for embedded metadata. The handling of embedded metadata by the DSpacePlugin was also slightly modified so that DC metadata in the dublin_core.xml files of DSpace documents get prefixed with “ex.”. This allows these metadata fields to be visible in GLI, while yet being unmodifiable, as they are still extracted (ex) metadata.
• Tried to reproduce some issues noticed by members of the mailing list.

Looks like I have some catching up to do.

My time is still mostly being spent on Greenstone 3, tidying up loose ends and making sure we haven’t forgotten anything.  One thing I fixed up was what Greenstone 3 does when GLI is started.  As most Greenstone 2 users will know, when you start up GLI the Greenstone 2 server window also starts.  Previously in Greenstone 3 nothing happened when GLI started (if the server wasn’t running then it would stay not running) but I have modified it so that on Windows the Tomcat window will launch as GLI is launched and on Linux it runs silently in the background.

I have also been spending some time working on the API for the new Document Maker facility that will no doubt make it into the public release of Greenstone at some stage (not 3.05 but maybe 3.06? It’s probably to early to say. Dr. David Bainbridge and I have been discussing the API in detail and I think we are close to finalising what needs to be included to support all of the operations we are planning. The next stage is figuring out how to do the things we want and then implementing them.

Forgot to write entries for the last two weeks

– A lot of time was devoted to ticket 449: after Dr Bainbridge’s initial solution to the problem in javascript, Sam and Veronica spent a lot of their time on it just so that we could get it to do the same in XSLT,  and so at last (yesterday, 4 July) this was finished.

– Sam and Dr Bainbridge noticed the GS2 server’s portnumber would keep incrementing at times if the chosen port was unavailable at that moment. Their ticket specified a way to request preserving the chosen port. So that was implemented some time last week.

– investigated pdf to text on Windows. Ghostscript seems to support ASCII conversion, but Greenstone would need unicode to be preserved. There were Perl solutions as well as open source programs to do this on Windows. For now, PDFBox has been tweaked to use its inbuilt ability to convert PDF to text when this is specified. Also looked into the latest version of AbiWord which Max pointed out as a free and small-sized alternative to MS Office and Open Office for converting docX files.

– the latest updates to acku and areu collections were uploaded

Last week I spent a fair amount of time helping out other people in Greenstone lab. One of our recent additions is a Masters student from India named Papitha. Her project involves using Greenstone 3 to create a framework for scholars to work with large sets of images and OCRed text and to organise these into cohesive collections. Some examples of potential functionality include dynamically creating new documents and merging and/or splitting existing documents. So I have been showing her the ins and outs of Greenstone 3, as well as helping to set up a platform for her to start working from.

There is also another Sam in the lab who had been working for us alongside working on his PHD, he took some time off to finish his PHD and now that his PHD is finished he is working for us part time again. He has been working on a way to more easily customise the format of Greenstone 3. As I’ve mentioned before, with Greenstone 3 we use XSL stylesheets to control the formatting of the various pages, instead of the format statements and macros that Greenstone 2 used. XSL stylesheets are good in that they give us a large amount of flexibility, but this can also make them difficult to understand (especially for people who don’t have any experience in XML) so Sam has been working on a way to hide a lot of the underlying complexity by presenting a simple interface on the pages themselves. I have been helping him with some of the XSL coding as well as some of the run-time code.