Documentation - Bamboo Wrap-Up - HOME - Spring 2013

About Project Bamboo

[QAD and SJM to handle this section]

An overview of Project Bamboo's eighteen-month planning phase (April 2008 - September 2010) and two-year technology implementation phase (October 2010 - September 2012). The planning phase brought together over 650 participants from 114 institutions and organizations, to address the question “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?” In the technology implementation phase, ten institutions were involved in technical development work around cataloging digital tools, interoperability of digital collections, proxied access to remotely hosted tools for scholarship, identity and access management, research environments, and curation of digital materials.

Cataloging Digital Tools for Humanities Scholarship: Bamboo DiRT

Bamboo DiRT is a directory of digital research tools, particularly targeting those tools relevant for humanities scholars. Developed by Project Bamboo in response to strong interest expressed by scholars, librarians and IT staff during the Bamboo Planning Phase (April 2008-September 2010), Bamboo DiRT expands on the longstanding DiRT (Digital Research Tools) wiki, providing an interface that facilitates task-oriented browsing and searching (e.g. “I need a research tool to manage bibliographic information”). Tools range from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.

1. Origin in Bamboo Planning phase [QAD]
2. Overview of site functionality as of March 2013. [QAD]
3. How to build a site like Bamboo DiRT using the Drupal content management system [QAD]

Interoperability of Digital Collections

Scholars who work with digital content from multiple repositories identified the heterogeneous formats used by those repositories as a barrier to efficient research workflows. This drove Bamboo’s efforts to develop a model for ‘normalizing’ the presentation of content from diverse repositories-- without sacrificing the formats and detailed metadata specific to any given repository-- in order to facilitate scholars’ use of digital tools for collecting, analyzing, and manipulating that content.

(cf. WIP wiki page Collection Interoperability - Documentation Summary 2013)

1. Humanist Scholars' Use of Digital Materials [Cole/Green, QAD]
2. Bamboo Book Model [Cole]
3. Collection Interoperability Hub: architecture and implementation  [Parod]; notes toward evolution/refactoring of implementation [various, may include Almas, Barton, Cole, Parod, Schmitz]
4. Local Fedora store, Repository Browser Client, and User Experience [BHB]

Proxied Access to Remotely Hosted Tools for Scholarship

Using a common RESTful service interface with a shared Identity and Access Management framework for a variety of distinct tools, computation resources, and storage services simplifies the process of integrating those functionalities into new applications and virtual research environments. Bamboo developed such a service interface, and implemented it for a small number of tools for textual analysis.

1. contextual overview, including value of service invocation in unified user/security context; cf. various BMA blog posts on Tech Wiki [SJM, BMA]
2. links to APIs and descriptive material in this documentation [SJM]
3. links/contacts re: ongoing availability of Scholarly Services running on BSP [SJM, BMA]

Identity and Access Management (IAM): Authentication and Authorization

Bamboo's Identity and Access Management infrastructure outsources authentication (login) to institutional Identity Providers (IdPs) (e.g., campus authentication systems based on Shibboleth), and/or to social media Identity Providers (such as Google). A Social/SAML gateway normalizes the data returned to applications and platforms by social media IdPs. Authorization (permission) to access services or resources is effected via definition, decision, and enforcement of policies that allow or deny service and resource access based on factors that include institutional affiliation; membership in groups managed independently of individual applications; resource ownership; and/or the identity of a client application from which a user issued her/his request.

1. Overview, perhaps drawn from SJM wiki post of Nov 2012, User-onboarding: creating a Bamboo Identity (or others) [SJM]
2. Component overview (cf. IAM Components and Status - background for assessing value and cost of PoC completion) [SJM]
3. Client-perspective overview on consuming / being-constrained-by IAM services (cf. Account Services Drupal module workflow  and/or IAM Components and Status - background for assessing value and cost of PoC completion and/or User-onboarding: creating a Bamboo Identity) [SJM]
4. Notes and links (including to install and configure docs in this documentation set) re: technologies necessary to the functioning IAM infrastructure (including Social/SAML GW, httpd for client auth, IdPs); and potential future (ECP N-Tier) [SJM, KH; cf. IAM-26, IAM-79, IAM-92, BSPTCH-37]
5. Links to APIs and architectural overview in this documentation [SJM]

Centrally-Hosted Bamboo Services: Development, Deployment, Invocation

Bamboo's centrally-hosted services include an IAM (Identity and Access Management) suite, Collection Interoperability Hub, and proxy services to remotely-hosted tools for scholarship. This set of services runs on FUSE ESB, an enterprise distribution of Apache's open-source ServiceMix (acquired in 2012 by RedHat). A number of additional, open-source technologies are required to support these services, including Apache Web Server (httpd), and Grouper.

1. Services APIs (CI Hub, Scholarly Services, IAM/Core/Utility services on BSP):
   
   1. RESTful wiki documentation (cf. WIP Documentation Space's access-restricted pages v0.8 as example, v0.9 in development (and public-visible) in the Service Description Repository) [SJM, FA]
   2. SOA-layer Javadoc [SJM, FA, BMA, Parod]
2. BSP Developer Workbench HowTo (cf.  WIP instructions for setting up a BSP Developer's Workbench, v0.9 ) [SJM, FA]
3. Client Auth HowTo (cf. access-restricted pages Apache Webserver Config for Client Auth - BSP and v2012-08-24 BSP Instance Install and Config Notes) [SJM, KH, Brian Wood; cf. IAM-103]
4. Grouper install and populate HowTo (cf. access-restricted WIP Grouper 2.1 Install) [SJM, KH; cf. IAM-77, IAM-107, IAM-108, IAM-113]
5. BSP Architecture [FA]
6. Notes on a hypothetical refactoring to yield an AuthZ framework of general utility [FA]

Research Environments to Store, Manipulate, and Manage Digital Content

Team members conducted usability studies, extended, and integrated open-source platforms built to manage and/or manipulate digital content. These platforms included HUBzero, Alfresco ECM, Drupal, and the OpenSocial framework. Integration with centrally-hosted BSP services was pursued atop the HUBzero and Drupal platforms; integration with an institutional archive (the California Digital Library's Merritt Repository) was pursued atop Alfresco ECM; and the OpenSocial framework was explored in conjunction with SURFnet. These efforts resulted in production of significant bodies of reusable code, such as a CMIS interface atop Fedora, and implementation of the ACL (permissions) aspect of the CMIS specification atop Apache Chemistry. In addition, usability studies at UC Berkeley led to production deployment of Alfresco ECM as an institutionally-supported production service, dubbed Research Hub. The term "Work Spaces" was used within the Bamboo Technology Project to name this broad area of software development and integration.

1. Overview [DAG]
2. CMIS atop Fedora [BHB]
3. CMIS ACL implementation atop Apache Chemistry, Fedora (permissions) [BHB]
4. Book Model implemented in Fedora store [BHB]
5. Diagram contextualizing "demonstration ware" (i.e., tools built in HZ: Repos. Browser, Syntactic Annotation UI) as instances of tools integrated in an RE built atop a general-use platform like HUBzero, Alfresco, Drupal [BHB]
6. Integration with Bamboo IAM infrastructure (using B Wood's initial work on Account Services Module as model from which to build/vet documentation) [SJM, KH, Brian Wood]
7. Managing groups across applications and platforms, cf.  Simple Group Synchronization  [SJM, BHB, FA]
8. Managing digital content with an institutionally-deployed ECM: Research Hub atop Alfresco ECM at UC Berkeley [Noah]
9. Managing digital content preservation via integration with an institutional archive (Alfresco@UCB - CDL Merritt Repository) [Noah]
10. Tool integration atop the OpenSocial API [Noah]
11. Links to code and APIs [SJM, BHB, Brian Wood, Noah]

Curation of Digital Materials: planning for future development

A faculty-led thread of work during the phase of the Bamboo Technology Project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was charged with setting direction for future development atop the successful products of the initial phase of work. The proposed direction, which was not ultimately funded, focused on support for collaborative curation of digital materials using shared identity and access management (IAM) services, and aggregation of textual content from multiple, heterogeneous repositories. During planning work for this activity, it was referred to as "CorporaSpace". The documentation in this section gives a conceptual overview of how the project team intended to move forward had funding been granted.

[QAD to handle this section]

1. not meant to be a full overview, but a conceptual look at where PB was headed toward were P2 to have gone forward
2. potential candidate documentation to include or from which to cull:
   
   1. Officer's Grant draft Sec 3 Rationale (access restricted to Quinn, David, Steve, Seth, Patrick; this material can be freely pulled into a public space at QAD's discretion)
   2. Bamboo Phase Two Classics Use Case
   3. May 31 proposal draft text from Appendix B Scholarly Data Management
   4. Martin Mueller's August 2011 draft-for-Bamboo Collaboratively Curating Early Modern English Texts (also note Martin's paper, Collaborative Data Curation of Early Modern English Texts from a Mellon workshop convened in May 2010, attached to the wiki page Mellon Workshop on curating Early Modern texts, May 11, 2010 as a precursor to the text drafted for Bamboo 15 months later)
   5. Bruce Barton's 'grand vision stage' articulation of P2 ambition: Phase II -- Building on Phase I

Proposals to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Final and funded proposals to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Bamboo Planning Project and Bamboo Technology Project are included here for reference. These were publicly-released scope-setting documents during the respective projects whose work they proposed.

[QAD to handle this section]

1. Final proposal for the Bamboo Planning Phase (public draft, QAD has access to the copy that was public on the Chicago-hosted projectbamboo.org site)
2. Final proposal for the Bamboo Technology Project, Phase I & only (public draft)

Links to Project Bamboo on-line artifacts

Links to related sites and material outside this wiki-hosted set of documentation are included for reference and convenience.

[QAD to handle this section]

1. can probably be a single page
2. includes links to:
   
   1. archived website
   2. wiki archives
   3. (post-project, e.g., Sourceforge) code repository
   4. javadoc (if hosted separately from this wiki)
   5. whatever's retained of JIRA issues
   6. e-mail list public archives (pb.org domain link and/or Google Sites link)
   7. Bamboo on social media (Flickr, Twitter, etc?)