Maintenance of externally-facing IVOA resources

Participants: 28
Chair: Raffaele D'Abrusco

Notes



Presentation by Raffaele D'Abrusco

Running Questions





I noted this morning the term KDIG wasn't in the ivoa glossary.   Is that list maintained?   it's likely to be out of date. When i tried editing it, the left colum with the abbreviations wasn't visible in my browser, so I stopped editing.
There probably are many terms missing. 

From PyVO and end user discussion: a place for linking VO example/teaching notebooks? (And other workshop materials?)
Hendrik Heinl (from chat): Regarding tutorials: you might want to take a look at http://dc.g-vo.org/VOTT
Mark Allen (from chat): Also tutorials here, with dates: http://www.euro-vo.org/?q=science/scientific-tutorials
Laurent (from chat): A set of tutorial: A search engine in the standards: http://saada.unistra.fr/esdoc/interfacePDF.html?index=ivoa# Can this help visitors?


MA - There is also the list of the applications pages; https://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/IvoaApplications
(a few tests shows this is out of date, and some expired domains etc...)


PT: what about a dead man switch type approach to pages. Nothing is more frustrating for  new comer to have no idea when this was last certified to work, or something like that. 
Raffaele: I would be as gentle as possible.
PT: Wiki pages show the date automatically, but are not so pretty. Nice websites often leave out "last updated" information.
Laurent: information with contact email for that application
Raffaele: Page is dense with links already, but yes, good idea.
TomD: we could keep the contact email but not display it. Could be in the registry?
Mark Taylor: we discussed apps in the registry before and decided not to do it

Bruce B: Are there automated tools that will check for link rot etc?
Marco M: tried one for the full ivoa.net&wiki, but powerful ones close the machine actionability. Need to use a crawler.

Hendrik Heinl: In Heidelberg we run VOTT which makes use of resource descriptors. It's a very basic functionality (a bit broke as I just noticed), but it's possible to automaticaly "kick out" tutorials if they are not checked for a certain time. 
http://dc.g-vo.org/VOTT?order=last_checked
There is also  http://www.euro-vo.org/?q=science/scientific-tutorials 
which is a curated list of tutorials developed within the EURO-VO and follow up projects. 
Crucial to all repositories like this is curation though. 

Dave Morris: before a meeting like this, have a few people run through all the apps, so that we have a regular report at every one of these meetings?
Raffaele: Want to keep this very objective. I don't want to be a gatekeeper. Text on the IVOA Apps page says that IVOA is not responsible for the apps working. 

DM: user perception is very negative if they find even just two or three links not working.
TomD: I endorse the short-term suggestions by Raffaele. The long-term ones are good, but I'm not clear on how to experiment with the layout. Pandoc, ReadTheDocs, source-based solutions like that could make this easier.

Ada: Running tutorials on Jupyter notebooks, and outside notebooks, is time-consuming. The checks can take hours. Could be a significant burden on TCG or whoever takes that on.
Raffaele: Yes, good point, sometimes takes half a day.

Séverin: Lot of content out there. Keep the onus on the page provider. We control things we can control. We can curate the things that we can, and concentrate on making sure we have links to interesting content.
David Shupe: Astropy puts badges on its affiliated pages with status of various items (docs, etc.). It is a lot of work, to go through these on a somewhat periodic basis.
Dave Morris: Can we crowdsource this? Get feedback from users? Webpages that pop up a survey after you view it?
We could have a standard review form embedded next to each outgoing link. Users rate the 'usefulness' of the thing by giving it [0 .. 5] stars and a one line comment. Many web content tools provide modules for this.

Xiuqin Wu: What is the procedure for adding an application you think is VO-compliant? Also, can we put the owner of the app, so users can contact them if they find a problem.
Raffaele: Answering the second question: 99% of the apps are connected with people I know from the IVOA, so seeking feedback from people here before making the procedure more formal.
Xiuqin: the app I have in mind is Firefly for the first question. Who do I contact to try to have it added to the webpage?
Raffaele: There's a contact email on the IVOA Apps page. There are multiple channels.
Mark Allen (on chat): there's a newsletter sent out twice a year; this can be used to advertise apps.
Laurent (on chat): deadline for the next newsletter issue is 22nd of May.
Marco: The page was mostly created at one time, so that's why links are broken. There is a media group. Twiki page also for software providers.
Raffaele: if this needs to be higher priority, for example requesting back links, we should change the policy so that the burden doesn't fall on just one working group.

Mark Taylor: does anyone know how many people look at that webpage? 
Raffaele: Not easy to find that out. There are services but you often have to pay, and I did not find an easy way to do it. Is Google Analytics used to track visits to this webpage?
Marco: checked the access logs and there doesn't seem to be Google Analytics information. The pages were moved a few months ago so the logs are not long. But, they could be parsed to make statistics on number of visitors.
Marco (in chat): 1800 accesses to "astronomers" in the last 5 days. Raffaele is probably a quarter to a third of this! There are many to filter out. about 500 hits checking unique IPs.

Raffaele: A few colleagues of mine who are not aware of IVOA as an organization, were surprised to find applications they use are VO applications. 

Raffaele: do we need approval to remove the dead links, or send email about the dead links? 
TomD: we need to become aware of who is in charge of this. We want to make this easy and not kick it up to the Exec
Committee. Or even to the TDIG. We can remove dead links before getting an answer.
Janet Evans: was Secretary on the Exec for a few years; they are sensitive to putting people off. Recommend to take the link away, but give folks a chance to get back on the IVOA Apps page if they straighten things out.
Raffaele: we can come to the IVOA Interop with a list of links to remove, and get approval at the Interop.
Janet: often had this conversation about the Registry. Some similarities, about being sensitive.

Daniel Durand: If something is an important entry point to the VO, we want to curate it. There are a lot of interesting tutorials and notebooks out there, but hard to find. For example, listing all the resources that would be usefulf for stellar astronomy; having these gathered together would be very helpful.
Raffaele: We could substructure the page
Daniel: we need to not be boring! Needs to be visually interesting.
Raffaele: We should use Twitter more. I left this out of the slides. We have a Twitter account for the IVOA. Could publish the URL to the IVOA Apps page via Twitter.

Raffaele: I'll go through the notes to see all the good feedback. In the next few weeks, I'll send an email to IVOA with a link to the updated spreadsheet. Then after another week, remove the bad links. That's the easy fix. Then we'll ask people to send us good apps they would like to have added. 

Dave Morris: Crazy idea: treat the website like our documents and place our HTML in a Github repo. Then we can raise issues. An issue could be raised that a link is bad; then it would get reviewed the same way as the procedure with our documents.
TomD: Yes, could do it depending on how this website is maintained. 
Marco: it is static HTML, like most of our webpages; don't make me go into the details. We have static HTML and Twiki. Have to check out -- might be a mess for .gitignore.
Mark Allen: before, there was a list of applications that was propagated -- this procedure stopped. Like all things in the IVOA there needs to be someone taking responsibility that things are up to date.

Janet: Raffaele's slides show only 8 links that are broken, so make sure the plan matches the problem. Perhaps the Github plan is good because it's only a few problem links per year -- this sounds manageable.


What do you want to do ?
New mailCopy