Forum OpenACS Q&A: Knowledge management package available

1: Knowledge management package available

Posted by Andreas Albrecht on 07/02/03 01:22 PM

We go the knowledge management package from the sharenet siemens project from redhat under GPL. I uploaded it in the storage area. Its not tested with the current openacs release.

http://www.openacs.org/storage -> packages

It would we interesting to get any feedback.

Andreas

2: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Lars Pind on 07/02/03 01:37 PM

Nice!

Thanks, Andreas.

Does anybody want to jump at making this compatible with OpenACS 4.6 or 5.0? Timo? Dirk? :)

/Lars

3: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 2)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/02/03 02:03 PM

From what I know, making it compatible is not the only thing the KM library needs, but also some considerable improvements to make it adhere to OpenACS standards.

But thanks a lot for releasing this to Bertelsmann. Whoever is going to make it compatible is surely more than willing to help you bring your site to OpenACS with the OpenACS KM Library.

4: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Timo Hentschel on 07/02/03 02:11 PM

It's great that the library code got posted, but there're so many other packages that this code is so tightly integrated with which makes this code not standalone: categories, general feedback, linking, alerting, email-templates, incentives... So in the end it will really need some time not only to clean up the code, but also integrate it with the current openacs again. I will most likely start with this in a few weeks.

5: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Marklund on 07/02/03 02:23 PM

Andreas,
thank you very much for releasing the heart of the ShareNet system! I imported the package to the contrib directory (see http://cvs.openacs.org/cvs/openacs-4/contrib/packages/library/) so that the efforts of the community to make this package work with OpenACS can be coordinated.

Andreas, is there any chance you could release ShareNet packages that the library package depends on (acs-workflow, bookmarks, categories, doubleclick, and general-feedback according to the info file)?

6: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Andreas Albrecht on 07/02/03 03:31 PM

I 've done an additional upload with the depending packages. I hope it works now.

7: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Lars Pind on 07/02/03 05:50 PM

If this is to be useful without major work, you actually need to provide the whole tree, all of the packages. As far as I'm informed, there have been significant changes to the ACS Core data models as well.

/Lars

8: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/02/03 06:35 PM

It is not going to be useful without major work. Anyone that worked on OpenACS since release 4.0b can tell you that a lot has changed since then. And this is the version (Timo, Dirk correct me if I'm wrong) that Sharenet and the knowledge library is based upon.

Changes that have happened since then on the code of Sharenet (as I don't know what changed in the OpenACS tree) I know of are:

- noquote
- no more parties and parties
- changed acs_rels
- new templating system
- many other smaller changes

Therefore you can either use the whole installation that Bertelsmann got (and hope that it works out of the box, but this is something Dirk can comment on), or start migrating all the relevant packages to OpenACS Head (I do suggest Head due to the support of noquote there).

Does this make the contribution less useful? Definitly not. Just be aware of the fact that we are not talking about OpenACS as you know it. And as Timo already mentioned, we are going to work on the migration of the KM Library, it is just a question of time and money (as we'd be financing this out of our own pockets for the moment).

9: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 7)

Posted by Andreas Albrecht on 07/02/03 06:36 PM

It's not allowed to upload more than 2 MB in the storage area. The complete installation has 12 MB as a ZIP file. If you want to have other packages or scripts I can Upload the separately.

10: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 8)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/02/03 06:39 PM

Ups. My first sentence is wrong. It should say: "The packages for the KM library are not going to be useful in the current OpenACS versions without major work". Sorry for any confusion this might arise.

11: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 9)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/02/03 06:52 PM

Hi Andreas, maybe someone can scp the whole installation to OpenACS.org and provide a download link somewhere. I think this is better than downloading all the packages seperatly.

12: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Andreas Albrecht on 07/03/03 09:23 AM

Now you can find the complete distribution in the file-storage:

Dave Bauer has increased the upload limit.

Andreas

13: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/03/03 11:29 AM

Malte, yes the file Andreas just uploaded should be installable. There's a file called "INSTALL" that describes the process.

How complex will be a forward-port? No idea. I presume, we just have to do it, right :)

14: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Marklund on 07/04/03 11:00 AM

I was able to install sharenet on our development box (see http://sharenet.cph02.collaboraid.net/library mailto:admin@collaboraid.net / sharenet) and I uploaded a new version of the distribution in File Storage,

15: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 14)

Posted by Jarkko Laine on 07/04/03 11:16 AM

Very cool, Peter. Is this a complete out-of-the-box installation or did you get the packages installed on top of a plain openacs instance?

16: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Lars Pind on 07/04/03 11:51 AM

Shouldn't we just put it in CVS on openacs.org as 'sharenet' or 'dotknw' or whatever (I believe IBM owns the trademark on sharenet) as a separate module alongside openacs-4.

/Lars

17: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/04/03 01:30 PM

Lars, yes, I think we should check in the whole code as a project and put it under proper CVS:

It is fully functional.
It is only somewhat openacs-related, but the fork is *very* fundamental.
We will have to fix bugs in the "ShareNet" code.

Err, as naming is important - yes we need one. The rights for the name "ShareNet" are owned by Siemens (or by some other company that may have acquired the rights from them). A friend of mine is being "persecuted" for trademark infringement, so I suggest we come up with a name and forget about "ShareNet" altogether.

18: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 15)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/04/03 02:04 PM

<p>Jarkko - as to the installation: you definitely need to install the process as described in INSTALL. All else: you'll run into unexpected problems.

19: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 18)

Posted by Jarkko Laine on 07/04/03 02:38 PM

Dirk: Yeah, I know Peter is fast but I was wondering (with a considerable doubt :) if he was so fast that he got the thingie openacs-compatible overnight.

20: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 14)

Posted by Andrei Mitran on 07/16/03 12:28 AM

The install instructions require a file called "site-wide-search-setup.sql" which is missing from the distribution. Any chance of making it available?

21: Re: Knowledge management - site-wide-search (response to 1)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/16/03 01:06 AM

It's most likely a misnomer, it should read intermedia-setup.sql I suppose. I'll look into this later this week (a bit of travel coming).

Anyway, the system is going to run without site-wide search.

22: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 20)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/16/03 09:23 AM

Andrei,

Peter cut out a lot of useless packages *and* changed the INSTALL document. Unfortunately he removed some important stuff and put in references to non-existing stuff. Download this version and follow its INSTALL instructions.

Err, another *very* important explanation now missing is how to set up a templating staging server...

23: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 22)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/16/03 09:28 AM

Plus you *must+ create the directories

/web/<webserverroot>/library-files
/web/<webserverroot>/bboard-files
/web/<webserverroot>/news-files

... and the monitoring package has disappeared from the tarball.

... and please always check whether pathnames are correct (look up the proper INSTALL doc) - they default to Solaris ! and the pathnames to perl etc there are annoyingly different.

24: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 22)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/16/03 09:32 AM

Needless to say, you also need GnuPlot and GraphViz otherwise the workflow module is not going to work properly.

25: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 22)

Posted by Andrei Mitran on 07/16/03 03:48 PM

Dirk,

Thanks, I'll give it a try. Thanks for the tips in the next messages as well.

Andrei

26: Re: Knowledge management package available (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 07/18/03 06:16 PM

Siemens has contacted us to inform us that, in their opinion, this code was released in error and is not under the GPL.

They have asked us to inform people who have downloaded it of this fact, and for us to tell you to delete your copies.

PLEASE DO SO IMMEDIATELY.

We are working with Andreas Albrecht, RedHat and Siemens to clarify the situation but in the interim we must assume that this is proprietary code.

We've also revoked read permissions on the file in file storage.

Since many in Europe are going on holiday shortly it may take several weeks to straighten this out, one way or the other.

Thanks, folks. It is extremely important that EVERYONE respect Siemens rights to the code and that you comply with their request while we sort things out.