GATHER update
Andreas Kollegger
Just wanted to keep people up to date on current activity with the
project. There are really three tracks that are progressing in
parallel -- integration, development and documentation. I'll touch
briefly on each of those.
Integration:
While I've identified a whole collection of frameworks, applications,
and other technology of which we'll take advantage, the two biggest
highlights are maven and Pentaho.
1. Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org) - for build management and
publishing products. We will be using maven for our own development,
for easing the adoption of our work by other developers, and for
automating some of the install process.
2. Pentaho (http://community.pentaho.com/index.php) - business
intelligence, with reporting, analysis, data transform and mining.
Pentaho is an incredible suite of applications which should provide us
with everything we need for working with the data that has been
gathered. Learning about and integrating Pentaho is my current focus.
Development:
I've developed a few maven-based java projects which demonstrate the
basic flow of GATHER, up to the reporting/analysis phase. My simple
example is based on monitoring a directory for xml files (an input
queue), storing the files in a local store, then publishing the
availability of the data. A subscriber then reads the data and
produces a simple CSV transform. The next step will be to produce a
data source that Pentaho can accept as input.
I will also be changing the file content to reflect a better example
case, using some disease indicators. When the XML is changed to being
an actual XForm, this end-to-end flow can be the basis of one of our
starter-kits. Install, run, fill out an XForm, drop it in the
directory, get it fed straight into the reporting framework.
Documentation:
I've been drawing (and re-drawing) UML diagrams of the overall
architecture and the parts that I'm implementing. That all is slowly
making its way to the wiki along with notes that I've taken about the
various technologies which we're integrating.
Cheers,
Andreas