EC Project 257859 Risk and Opportunity management of huge-scale BUSiness community cooperation Prototype D10.2: Project Web-site 29 Dec 2010 Version: 1.0 Thomas Gottron gottron@uni-koblenz.de Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau Dissemination Level: PU Public ROBUST Consortium, 2010 1/8
Executive Summary This report complements deliverable D10.2 and describes the purpose, the technical setup and the content structure of the project web-site for the ROBUST project. Additionally, plans to maintain the web-site s liveliness are incorporated. The web-site of the ROBUST project is published under the domain www.robust-project.eu and provides information on the project to a larger public. Therefore, it describes and promotes the projects objectives and activities on a high level and in a jargon-free language. A blog section, the incorporation of contents from Twitter and frequent updates of results, reports and deliverables from the project keep the web-site lively and active. Further, the web-site is supposed to create a virtual centre of excellence around the ROBUST project, by integrating a connection to related online social networks and providing general contents regarding the developments on community analysis. An instance of the Plone CMS provides the technical basis which is extended by plugins to realize particular features and content syndication with Bibsonomy and Twitter. ROBUST Consortium, 2010 2/8
Project Web-site Table of Contents 1. Purpose and Intention of the Project Web-site...3 2. Content Structure...4 2.1. Home...4 2.2. News...4 2.3. Project...5 2.4. Partners...5 2.5. Publications...5 2.6. Results...5 2.7. Links...6 2.8. Contact...6 2.9. Community Integration...6 3. Technical Implementation...6 3.1. Technical Infrastructure...6 3.2. Content Management System...7 3.3. Bibsonomy Intergation...7 3.4. Twitter Integration...7 1. Purpose and Intention of the Project Web-site The ROBUST project web-site (www.robust-project.eu) provides information on the project to a larger public. Therefore, it describes and promotes the project s objectives and activities on a higher level abstracted from both the administrative project structure and the technical details in the research work going on in the project. It is intended as a very simple and highly accessible shop window for the project. The web-site addresses customers, peers and the research community in the fields affected by the work done in the project. It is supposed to create curiosity, interest and interactive feedback from these groups and create a virtual centre of excellence around the ROBUST project. This objective is addressed in a twofold way, by (a) integrating the web-site with public social networks to gain a wide visibility and (b) designing the contents to provide a general look at the analysis of online communities and business oriented communities in particular. Ideally, visitors should consider the web-site as a reference point and authority on community analysis rather than a place where to obtain only information about the project. ROBUST Consortium, 2010 3/8
The second point aligns with the aim not to describe the projects administrative architecture of work packages and deliverables, nor complicated scientific formulas, but rather deliver high-level, general information about the project itself, its nature and objectives. Frequent updates on the ongoing related work and results inside but also external to the project will keep the web-site alive. As technical base we employ the Plone CMS and integrate several other public web resources, in particular with those that have a strong relation to online communities, such as Bibsonomy and Twitter, are closely related to the topic, like projects with a similar focus and finally platforms providing open source software created in the context of ROBUST. 2. Content Structure The content of the web-site is structured based on an easy-to-understand schema, which in parallel serves as primary navigation hierarchy. The top level navigation points are: Home, News, Project information, Partners, Publications, Results, Links and Contact. 2.1. Home The navigation point Home refers to the landing page and is equivalent to the entry point when coming to the web-site. This first page will give a very brief description of what the web-site is about, list the most recent entries in the news section (see 2.2) and the most recent project related tweets (see 3.4). Incorporating these dynamic fields with frequently changing contents demonstrate the liveliness of the web-site and give a good overview of what is currently going on in the project. The navigation point Home is a standard interaction method and helps users to easily navigate the web-site, as they can always and easily get back to the landing page. 2.2. News Under the section News all of the partners will report in a blog style on news, activities and ongoing work related to or of interest for the project. The main idea for the blog is that all partners can contribute frequently to the contents of the web site. While such a publication of an article can be made at any time, we will additionally schedule each month a summary or overview article from one of the partners. This keeps the web-site alive and fosters the generation of fresh contents on a frequent basis. News items comprise planned or accepted publications of papers at relevant conferences or journals, the availability of a live demonstrator or the release of a report or a prototype. While some of these items will appear also at other places of the web-site (see 2.5 and 2.6), the blog can be exploited to promote this kind of news and provide more details. Additionally, interesting progressions, thoughts, ideas, considerations or other relevant high level articles can be published in the blog. ROBUST Consortium, 2010 4/8
In particular, conferences and workshops on which ROBUST results are presented will be included. This permits interested people to obtain an insight into the ongoing work by direct contact and meeting people at a conference. Also conference and workshops organized by partners and in the fields of interest of ROBUST will be announced here. Likewise all partners will due to the course of ongoing work monitor the developments in relevant areas. Also discoveries outside the ROBUST consortium can be published in the form of a blog entry, if they are of interest for the community. A typical occasion for feedback from outside of the project can be an attendance to a conference or a workshop, where the latest findings in relevant fields are discussed and stimulate new ideas. 2.3. Project The category Project provides a description of the project itself. Mainly, the description here will focus on the setting, the objectives and the intended impact of the project. The contents will be very similar to the project fact sheet (deliverable D10.1). The intention of this section is to provide a quick overview for people interested in the ROBUST project. Under this point they could find information on the topics ROBUST is dealing with. A few simple examples might serve to explain how the work done in ROBUST reflects to concrete real world scenarios of risks and opportunities in online communities. 2.4. Partners Further information on the composition of the consortium will extend the project description with a focus on the institutions, enterprises and people involved in ROBUST. The purpose of this section is to introduce the consortium in more detail and underline the expertise flowing into the work. An overview article will briefly list the involved institutions and enterprises, while individual descriptions will go into more details. Partners will explain their background and contribution to the project. 2.5. Publications In order to connect to the research community in particular scientific publications at conferences or in journals of interest. They will be listed and referenced in this section. Bibliographic information will be hosted at Bibsonomy and integrated dynamically into the web-site (see also 3.3). Additionally, publications can be made available as pre-prints. This renders the scientific results visible to a wider group in academia and can attract interest from and interaction with the research community. 2.6. Results Public deliverables, i.e. reports and prototypes will be published on the website as well, as they describe the progress and outcome of the project. External resources, such as open source software components will be referenced and explained. High quality screen casts, demonstrations, videos, and supplementary information like manuals complement the published ROBUST Consortium, 2010 5/8
resources. This continuous dissemination of results is supposed to attract interest in the outcome of the project at customers and peers. Documents and other resources published in this section e.g. deliverables and public reports will be held in widely accepted format such as PDF/A which guarantees long-term accessibility. External resources will be hosted on reliable and well established platforms, which can be expected to be available throughout and well beyond the project s lifetime. 2.7. Links The link collection will list relevant references to information on the web, such as related projects, user groups, articles, relevant EC sites or software components of interest in the context of ROBUST. The list will constantly be updated and extended throughout the course of the project. 2.8. Contact In order to allow interaction with the project consortium and as a primary point of reference this section lists an email address leading to the project coordinator. Additional contact information, such as the presence of ROBUST in social networking platforms will be listed here. 2.9. Community Integration By integrating content from social media and the connection to the Bibsonomy platform we automatically connect the ROBUST project to online communities. For the launch of the website we will integrate Twitter messages related to the project. People involved in the project will use a particular hashtag (#ictrobust) to mark tweets associated with the work on the project. Establishing such a tag in the vocabulary of twitter users will support the introduction of ROBUST as a topic in online communities. 3. Technical Implementation In order to enable a comfortable management of contents and an easy access for partners to contribute to the contents, it is necessary to establish the website on a modern technological grounding. Web content management systems (CMS) are dedicated tools to achieve this goals and the ROBUST web-site is employing such a system, extended by a few plugins to realize particular features and content syndication. 3.1. Technical Infrastructure The ROBUST web-site is published on a virtual server at the Institute of Web Science and Technologies. Using a virtual machine has the advantage to make better use of hardware resources and supports flexible transition between real servers. This allows for providing a better uptime of the server as it is less depended on concrete hardware. A fixed IP address is assigned to the virtual machine and the domain names robust-project.eu and robust.west.uni-koblenz.de are registered to resolve to this IP address. The domains, the virtual machine and all contents will be ROBUST Consortium, 2010 6/8
available throughout the project and will remain online for at least two years after the end of the ROBUST project. 3.2. Content Management System We employed the Plone CMS, which is based on the ZOPE application server. There are several reasons for using Plone in the context of ROBUST: Plone is an actively developed, well documented, professional open source CMS. Plone can be extended by plugins, which are actively supported by a wide community of developers. Plone comes with a flexible template mechanism that permits to personalize the appearance of the web-site. Authors can easily and comfortably add, edit and review contents within Plone. Plone supports user roles, access restrictions and an editorial review process for publishing contents. The University of Koblenz has in-house expertise with Plone, as the university s web-site is based on a Plone installation as well. The ROBUST web site is running the latest Plone version 4.0.1 on a Zope 2.12.11 system. The XDV theme support version 1.0rc11 plugin is used to create an individual layout and appearance of the site. A student research assistant is maintaining the software infrastructure of the CMS and related services. 3.3. Bibsonomy Intergation The Bibsonomy platform offers various options for integration, such as a full fletched API based on RESTful webservices, an integration into reference management software JabRef and various RSS feeds. The RSS Dynamic document 0.3 plugin for Plone allows for an easy integration of arbitrary RSS-feeds from the web. As Bibsonomy offers RSS based access to all bibliographic entries marked with a given tag, we use this mode of integration. All entries marked with robust-project will automatically be listed on the web-site. All partners will contribute their ROBUST related publications to the Bibsonomy platform using this tag. 3.4. Twitter Integration Integration of Twitter is achieved by a plugin as well. Also in this case the listed tweets are restricted to all tweets containing a pre-defined hashtag. As mentioned above, partners will us the hashtag #ictrobust to annotate all tweets related to ROBUST. The frontpage of the web-site will list the most recent tweets containing the #ictrobust hashtag. ROBUST Consortium, 2010 7/8
Version history Version Date Author Comments 0.1 06/12/2010 Thomas Gottron Initial draft of deliverable 0.2 22/12/2010 Thomas Gottron Extension of technical details 1.0 29/12/2010 Thomas Gottron Inclusion of review feedback Acknowledgement The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n 257859, ROBUST ROBUST Consortium, 2010 8/8