Dear Community! My devious little plan for 3.16 is to start getting some RDF/Linked Data/Semantic Web stuff into Koha. There are two sides to this, both of which should of course be completely opt-in and without side-effects for the MARC-based functionality in Koha: * MARC2RDF conversion MARC records should be converted to RDF and stored in a triplestore, whenever they are added to Koha or edited in Koha. Chris Cormack already made a start on this, but I think we agree now that the actual conversion should be re-written to use Catmandu::RDF. My plan is to either nag Chris into doing this or to fork what he already did and re-write it myself. ;-) * Browsing RDF data in the triplestore should be browsable in the OPAC. I have code for this that is almost ready to be submitted, but I will do some more tweaking before I unleash it. Even if I fail miserably at all of this, it sounds like 3.16 is going to be pretty great! :-) Best regards, Magnus Enger libriotech.no On 10 December 2013 01:59, Galen Charlton <gmc@esilibrary.com> wrote:
Hi,
For discussion, here is a list of some of some things I would like to see in 3.16. This is not meant to be complete; please feel free to use this thread both to comment on my goals and to suggest goals that you're personally willing to advocate for -- and by advocate for, I mean that you and/or the institutions who support your Koha activity are ready and willing to take concrete steps to help implement it. I ask that if all you have is an idea -- no matter how good! -- but not any concrete code or plans to have it be ready in the next few months -- please start a different thread.
[1] Deprecation of the GRS-1 mode for Zebra.
Reason: the DOM index filter allows greater flexibility for setting up indexing definitions. The DOM filter also offers a path (among other options) towards indexing non-MARC metadata.
Obstacles: the default UNIMARC indexing rules for the DOM filter need more testing. There is also an ongoing discussion about the desired semantics for the Any index, which at present behaves differently with the current DOM indexing rules as compared with GRS-1.
Upgrade considerations: in order to truly deprecate the GRS-1 filter, at some point there will have to be a forced reindexing upon upgrade.
[2] Use DBIx::Class to deploy the database schema for new installations.
Reason: Maintaining multiple SQL schema scripts, one for each DBMS we want to support, would be error prone. Making edits to classes under Koha/Schema, then using ->deploy(), offers the possibility of initializing both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.
DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned could be used at as way of managing schema updates
Obstacles: DBIx::Class doesn't automatically know anything about indexes required for good performance; consequently, it will be necessary to write hooks for (at least) MySQL to create the necessary indexes.
[3] Relaunch PostgreSQL support
Reason: PostgreSQL is a compelling alternative to MySQL, and now that we have DBIx::Class in place, managing the schema for PostgreSQL is now a more reasonable proposition.
For 3.16, I propose the following specific goals:
- Koha will be installable on a Pg database - A staff user will be able to create or import and bib record and item - A public catalog user will be able to search for and retrieve that item - a reasonable number of the database-dependent tests will pass
In other words, I'm not proposing that Pg support be ready for production by 3.16, just that it be just good enough that a developer who wants to improve Pg support isn't starting from nothing.
[4] Upgrade the version of Bootstrap we use to 3.x.
A new major release of Bootstrap was made recently. Unfortunately, it is not backwards compatible with previous versions (see http://bootply.com/bootstrap-3-migration-guide for a taste of the issues involved).
As much as I'm personally not exactly a fan of the changes that were made to the CSS class names, we're much better off if we bite the bullet now and update both staff and OPAC to use the new version of Bootstrap rather than, two years down the road, finding out that we're completely stuck on Boostrap 2.3.
Regards,
Galen -- Galen Charlton Manager of Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org
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