Attendance

Attendees:

• Rolf Krahl
• Salman Matalgah
• Louise Davies
• Kirsty Syder
• Malik Almohammad
• Patrick Austin
• Gabriel Preuß
• Santhosh Anandarama
• Allan Pinto
• Alan Kyffin (joined to give icat.server component update)

Agenda

Site Updates

SESAME

No major updates. Some discussion with private company around archival. Got new tape storage.

HZB

Not much new to report.

ESRF

No one attending.

ISIS

Completed user office API implementation. Published to production. Recently moved service(s) to new host(s). Working on cleaning up 5000+ Investigations without Datasets. Working on "cleaning" these.

DLS

Nothing major, some performance problems, currently, getting data out of the archive . Search perfomance in general. Want to use DatasetType to distinguish between raw and other types of data (e.g. processes outputs from users).

• Rolf: We use DatasetType to distinhuish this, but mostly have raw data at the moment.
• Louise: Using them in this way is the intended purpose of DatasetType.
• Rolf: use it for Rules, different access rules for raw vs processed

SIRIUS

Working on production, working on infrastructure for download to be available to users. Working on authentication, finished setting up keycloak, working setting up certificates for HTTPS

• Louise: a few people replied to your email about use of Rules.
• Allan: put these Rules on our instance. Our backlog is quite long, but taking it down step by step.
• Louise: Also good to have it documented what the different facilities do. Get set up once, but hard to say what another facility should do.
• Rolf: Don't look at them for years, then wonder what the intent was years later.
• Allan: Think that the work done is consistent. Believe we will not change too much. Clear. Main problem is the permission... deciding which Rules to apply. Interaction with the board of directors (policy rather than technial issue). Saw that the Rules rely on JPQL. Think that will need to study this. But the process is clear.
• Louise: watch out, there's 2 syntaxes of rules. JPQL rules & "old notation"/custom in house rules.
• Rolf: I have it on my TODO list to go through our rules and document them, but very low priority
• Rolf: could do a workshop on facilities' rules
• Patrick: I do have a very long slideshow that does do some basic analysis & comparison of STFC facilities, HZB & ESRF

Component Updates

python-icat

About to prepare 1.4 release. Very minor release. Config module, for webserver scripts the CLI parsing for config may conflict. May consider turning CLI parsing off completely.

1.1 introduced ingestion workflow, improved in 1.2 & 1.3 - has anyone used it and has feedback? Patrick: is this icat dump and icat ingest? Rolf: no, those file formats are too powerful, new ingestion method builds on top of these and is only built on XML. Reduced capabilities but designed for ingestion from experiments. Uses XLST to convert from restricted format to more general format Patrick: I use YAML ingest/dump, not new method Rolf: originally designed for debugging Rolf: going to declare it stable, in absence of negative feedback

Plans for 2.0, reviewing internal data structure of query module. This may affect datagateway-api which Rolf thinks subclasses the Query class Louise: yes, it subclasses to modify the __init__ method to support the pansoc search API use case

2.0 is in the future. Expect to include support for ICAT 7 schema changes. Will request review at the start of next week.

icat.server

Alan thinking of changes to the GateKeeper. Limit the amount of DB interactions that happens when we search. Searches returned from Lucene, but all results have to go to DB to be authorised. But you could potentially mark documents as public in lucene so you don't have to go via the DB.

No plans for a release date, but part of wider effort to make icat.server thread safe. No breaking changes though.

AOB

NOBUGS satellite meeting

https://indico.esrf.fr/event/149/ - draft schedule for the meeting. ESRF & SciCAT met to discuss this. Can now sign up for remote participation

Next meeting date

Next monthly meeting collides with NOBUGS. Should probably move the meeting to week before or after

RDA plenary

Rolf is going, suggesting that Allan could go since it's in Costa Rica. Session on Photon & Neutron Science (agenda), half on national infrastructures, contribution from PSDI, other half on X-ray absorption spectroscopy. If people are interested, register for conference. Also need to register for remote participation, at a reduced fee.