[Clipart] Progress and Roadmap

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:

> 1. SPAMMERS to be banned. Also, how does anyone of us go about banning 
> people?
> 
> 202.107.216.99 218.74.23.215 220.184.52.243 221.218.27.14

Done.

Jon, look at the wiki.pl config for how to activate yourself as an
admin, if you want to help ban spammers.  A second admin would be
handy. 
 
> We need to do some collective brainstorming on how to defeat or offset 
> these spammers. I'm getting really sick of them, but am not willing to 
> be defeated ourselves and implement username/password for our project.
> 
> 
> 2. I have updated the roadmap for the project.
> 
> http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Roadmap
> 
> Believe it or not, but we are already at a 1/3rd into the month. Thus, 
> check out the roadmap and see where you can throw down. We need really 
> simple things like screenshots to be uploaded with our great automated 
> tool: http://www.openclipart.org/cgi-bin/upload_screenshot.cgi
> 
> Bryce, it looks like a lot of taks are related to the DMS. Could you 
> lets us all know how we can help you? I think it really worked to have 
> us all help on the last release. We should do that again to relieve 
> stress from your back.

Yeah that was a big help.  More work on cleaning up and prepping the
clipart for the next release would help the project a lot.  

For dms, I am currently focusing on the authentication aspects, that
would permit us to tie the system in with the Mantis database.  I
released WebService::TicketAuth 1.01 today, which provides an example of
exactly how to link these together.  So the next step would be to pull
in the dbi example, change the config to match Mantis, and test it
against Mantis.

Getting the authentication sorted out was the biggest hurdle; auth is
always the most painful part of making a web service since it tends to
be kinda complicated.  An enhancement that would be nice to have is SSL
encryption of the login() function; unfortunately it sounds like this is
unimplemented in SOAP::Lite presently.  But it isn't a major stumbling
block; we can have regular login for now, and hopefully things will
improve down the road.

Aside from authentication, here are some other coding tasks that are
needed:

   * Write routines for managing an RDF file.  It must allow for
     generating a RDF file (metadata.rdf) from a document's title,
     subject, keywords, etc.  This is to be used by default for files
     that don't support embedded RDF like SVG does.

   * Flesh out the Document::Object module.  Add support for updating
     metadata in metadata.rdf or to the svg file directly via
     SVG::Metadata.

   * Alter submit_clipart script so it can send a file to the server.
     Basically, the file needs to be wrapped up as a MIME package and
     sent to the server.  On the server side, we need the
     Document::Manager::add() routine to be able to unencode and store
     the file to a tmp location, and then add it to the repository.

   * Add support for use of File::Log to Document::Repository and
     Document::Manager (and maybe Document::Object too).  This should
     replace the get_error/_set_error routines

   * Come up with a SQL db structure for storing information about 
     files (e.g. metadata from SVG files).  The more general purpose,
     the better.

   * Create a Perl function that uses SVG::Metadata to load up the
     metadata for an SVG file, and then inserts it into a database.

   * Implement the query() routine in Document::Manager.  Then add
     better support for it in the ls_docs script.

   * Add a mechanism for storing the state of a file to
     Document::Object.  Perhaps it can store the state in the file's
     metadata, or else maybe it should be specified by a separate file. 

   * Add support for managing document states to Document::Manager in
     the state() routine (see comments).

Anyway, there's more but those are the biggies.  

> Other than my keepalive email, does anyone else have anthing to report. 
> I have this talk next week in San Francisco which is gonna catalyze my 
> activity to another level.

Go recruit some more people.  :-)

Our most serious need are for people who can help review and sort
through the current clipart, remove duplicates, update keywords, correct
misspellings, etc. etc.  Lots of work to be done there.

Bryce