DEEP THOUGHT

Web based System for Managing and Presentation of Research and Student Projects

Tom´aˇs Gregar, Radka Posp´ıˇsilov´a and Tom´aˇs Pitner

Department of Computer Systems and Communications, Masaryk University, Botanick´a 68a, Brno, Czech Republic

Keywords:

Python, Subversion, Project management system, Web 2.0, Tagging, Ontology, XML, Wiki, Trac, Plug-in,

Bug-tracking, Visualization, Portal, Metadata, Agile programming, Extreme programming, Semantics.

Abstract:

There are plenty of projects solved each day at academic venues – small in-term students’ projects without any

real usability, bachelor and diploma thesis, large interdisciplinary or internationally supported projects. Each

of them has its own set of requirements how to manage it. Aim of our paper is to describe these requirements,

and to show how we tried to satisfy them. As a result of further analysis we designed and implemented

system Deep Thought (under development since autumn 2007), which united the management of distinct

categories of projects in one portal. System is based on open-source technology, it is modular and hence

it is capable to integrate heterogeneous tools such as version control system, wiki, project presenting and

managing. This paper also introduces aims of the future development of the system, such as interoperability

with other management systems or better connection with the lecture content and teaching process.

1 INTRODUCTION

Our department has mixed objectives – learning and

research. Programming oriented lectures are held,

bachelor and diploma thesis (aimed on developing

some software utility or describing some design pat-

terns, frameworks etc.) are offered. On the other

hand, also non-learning research projects are solved.

Each project has to be properly managed – and its

original cause and importance is irrelevant for man-

agement purposes. Every project has its program ar-

tifacts, whose have to be presented and managed, its

deadlines and users.

For example, in the particular case of the de-

partment of the authors, we can talk about tens

of each-term student projects, circa thirty bachelor

and diploma theses and some non-learning research

projects each year. This amount is growing because

of rising popularity of programming lectures (such

as Introduction to Java, Modern tagging languages

etc.). Such amount of the projects requires formal

management. Following sections show manager re-

quirements, techniques which was adopted to solve

them, and ﬁnally, the system Deep Thought itself.

2 MANAGER REQUIREMENTS

During last ﬁve years of managing student and re-

search projects, these manager requirements were

identiﬁed:

• Centralized and hierarchical repository – required

for further usage and archiving. Hierarchical di-

vision is vital for preserving a overview in such

broad database. Students’ projects should be

archived too.

• Project describability – functionality description,

assignment, reference lists etc. These metadata

are important for usability preservation in the fu-

ture. Further development and employment of the

project is impossible without documentation.

• Project status examining – the manager has to

be informed about develop processes. Some of

them are explicitly created by developer (techni-

cal notes), others are created automatically (statis-

tics, quality metrics). Possibility of monitoring

the status can be seen also as learning issue. Pro-

cesses like examination of the programming code

quality or monitoring of development have learn-

ing values.

• Output presentation – If the project evolves into

443

Gregar T., Pospíšilova R. and Pitner T. (2009).

DEEP THOUGHT - Web based System for Managing and Presentation of Research and Student Projects.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 443-447

DOI: 10.5220/0001981404430447

 SciTePress

some usable tool, it is important to have utilities

and site to present it to the possible users. Such

presentation have to be user-friendly, it must offer

downloadable artifacts, user documentation, bug

reporting tool, some interface for communicate

with the developers etc.

Further information about these issues can be found

in (Gregar et al., 2008) (written in Czech).

3 OLDER APPROACH

We use system Subversion (SVN)(Collins-Sussman

et al., 2008) for storage of students’ and research

projects. It is version control system, capable to up-

load new versions, resolve document conﬂicts (docu-

ment conﬂict is a state, when exact part of the docu-

ment is edited by two or more users simultaneously,

with different output) etc. SVN is integrable in the

majority of operating systems, into the IDEs of dif-

ferent programming languages. Subversion works as

accessible and safe archive.

Wiki is a suitable tool in the area of creating

and editing data about projects, as well as collabo-

rative preprocessing, analysis, background research,

projects reviews etc. Wiki allows to easily create and

format hypertextdocuments. We have been using Me-

diaWiki(Barrett, 2008)

implementation with some

modiﬁcations (for example cooperation with authen-

tication service from the information system of the

university).

We also utilized system Maven2(J. Van Zyl et al.,

2008). It is Java-based shell for automatic compiling

and building an application. It provides a possibility

to generate various reports and quality measurements

of the project.

4 PROJECT MANAGEMENT

SYSTEMS

Every category of projects has slightly different ac-

cent of the common requests (i.e. research project

should has better output presentation, in-term project

requires deep status examining). It would be a beneﬁt

to have a portal, which can satisfy all main requests

and can be used for all categories of projects.Other

important requirement was to retain wide amount

of data from already managed projects. Search of

such project management system started in Novem-

ber 2007.

http://kore.ﬁ.muni.cz:5080

We did not ﬁnd any suitable existing system – ei-

ther the license was too expensive (for example portal

for MIT’s Simile project

, Jazz from IBM) or lack

some important features (for example SourceForge

XPlanner).

System Trac (see section 3.1) satisﬁes our require-

ments for the managing one project but it cannot work

as a multiproject portal. We decided to utilize and ex-

tend Trac as a part of our portal. During state of the

art analysis we found several projects, one of them

was named DrProject, multiproject system based on

Trac. But system was functionally insufﬁcient for our

needs that time. Without ﬁnding any usable project,

we decided to develop our own portal system.

4.1 Trac

Portal Deep Thought was build upon the system Trac

(Edgewall Inc., 2008). Trac is an enhanced wiki and

issue tracking system for one project software devel-

opment. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-

based software project management. It has not all

abilities we require, but it has a modular structure

and can be modiﬁed (added other data interfaces, user

rights processing, new modules for new functionality

etc.). Trac is written in object oriented script language

Python.

It has these standard modules:

• User friendly browser of the project code. SVN

repository is one of the supported tools. Browser

also allows viewing source code as differences

between distinctive versions, the antecedent revi-

sions of the code etc.

• Bug reporting and tracking utility – structure of

the page concerning this issue, named ticket, can

be modiﬁed according to author’s requirements.

• Project management – deﬁnition of the develop-

ment milestones, project component declaration,

development monitoring etc.

• Presentation materials creation with integrated

Wiki system.

Trac can manage only one project. Other prob-

lems comprise a requirement to have access to server

command line (for creating project, updating system),

lack of the free-form GUI modiﬁcation etc. It also

does not allow localization in any way (which is prob-

lem in non-english speaking countries.)

http://simile.mit.edu/

http://sourceforge.net

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

444

4.2 DrProject

DrProject is based on similar idea as our implemen-

tation. Both of them are derived from Trac and spe-

cialized for academic purposes. Massive changes in

Trac’s source code had been done due to functionality

extension in DrProject. It causes inability to use some

plugins. It has no internationalization support.

On the other hand, DrProject in the recent time

grows into useful application. It has advanced tagging

engine (relation between tag and its project visualiza-

tion, global vs. local tagcloud). System has also nice,

javascript framework driven, GUI.

5 DEEP THOUGHT

Figure 1: Deep Thought screenshot - project presentation.

5.1 Requirements and Development

Design and implementation of the system are done by

prototyping using extreme programming techniques.

Wiki was used in analyzing important capabilities and

for communication about the development process.

We try to unify the project management as much as

possible while covering the wide range of require-

ments coming from very different projects’ nature. In

the analysis and developmentof such project manage-

ment system, we took the advantage of a rich built-in

functionality (in Trac) but it had to be strongly mod-

iﬁed to satisfy the important functionality require-

ments. Modiﬁcations contain:

5.1.1 Multiproject Management

Figure 2: Deep Thought Structure.

In Trac, every single project, conﬁguration, source

codes, user rights are treated separately. Trac pro-

grammers community generated some concepts how

more projects can be treated (none of them ofﬁcially

accepted). Some proposals change database structure,

others base system components. We would like to

avoid such changes. They decrease a possibility to

use third-party modules and plug-ins without com-

plex changes of the source code.

We found one ellegant solution

. It is based on uti-

lization of schemes in shared PostGreSQL database.

This minimalizes interventions in source codes and

allows to gain global view (with help of user deﬁned

database stored procedures) on the data.

Other important issue is to centralize the settings.

Conﬁguration ﬁles used by the system work with a

concept of inheritance. The whole project ﬁle-system

was rebuilt into multi-project structure, in which is

global conﬁguration separated from particular project

information. Access rights management have to be

centralized as well. Plug-in TracForge was used to do

this. Authentication proceeded by HTTP-Basic, was

changed to utilization of faculty Kerberos server.

5.1.2 Project Presentation

Presentation of the projects is also simpliﬁed by hi-

erarchical structure of project categories(Pospisilova

and Gregar, 2008). User can switch between projects

and categories. Management of these categories and

their content is easily done by the system administra-

tion module. It uses wiki pages to create this hierar-

chical structure.

New database and directory structure is created

within Deep Thought installation. This structures are

http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/

TracMultipleProjects/ComprehensiveSolution

DEEP THOUGHT - Web based System for Managing and Presentation of Research and Student Projects

445

ready to add further projects. Meta-project, called

master, is also created. It does not describe any par-

ticular project. It contains texts and documents about

the entire portal, shows global ticket lists, global tag

lists, it allows to administrate the whole system etc.

5.1.3 Project Management Simpliﬁcation

Deep Thought system has New project web adminis-

tration module (in the Trac system it had to be created

in command line and set manually). With new project

creation, the path to the repository is mapped, ba-

sic web-pages are created, user rights for basic user-

groups are adopted from master settings. Transporta-

tion of projects, which were managed with the older

approach, became easier.

5.1.4 Internationalization

Python allows to develop internationalized programs.

Trac does not contain such feature. One of its devel-

opment branches tries to add this support. We used it

as a basis for our work. Many changes had to be made

to clarify, clean up and correct that branch. We also

redeﬁned a set of translation strings. That capability

is important (see section 2), but no other multiproject

system utilizes it. We have started to solve localiza-

tion of wiki pages and tickets after we ﬁnished local-

ization of texts and the other GUI features. We need

variants for distinct languages in the internationalized

DT. Unfortunately, the modiﬁcation of wiki version

system is relatively complicated – it requires many

changes in the Trac core and in the GUI. Therefore

we decided to create a new wiki-macro. Tag

lang

occurred in the page, signalize that the latter text is

in the deﬁned language. Tag contains locale infor-

mation about consequential text (see an example in

screenshot).

5.1.5 Better Output Presentation for Users

Presentation functionality was enriched by external

Trac plug-ins, sometimes modiﬁed to offer better in-

corporation or better functionality(A. Thomas et al.,

2008).

• Pictures and Screen-shots gallery – Screenshot-

sPlugin

module

• Databases of downloadable ﬁles – DownloadsPlu-

gin

module

• Incorporation of output from Maven tool –

slightly modiﬁed MavenTrac module

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/ScreenshotsPlugin

http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/DownloadsPlugin

Figure 3: Multilanguage wiki-page editing.

• Discussion forum

• Tagging – user-driven tagging of documents

within system. This plug-in – TagsPlugin – was

modiﬁed to provide global overview of the tags.

It will be described in next section.

5.1.6 Design Changes

Trac offers some possibility to change a design. The

basic conﬁgurable part of the design (like logo) are

adjustable in the project conﬁguration ﬁle. Output

of the system is written in modular HTML. Slight

change, creating the global container, had to be made

to enable page design. Graphic changes have been

made by cascading styles (CSS).

6 SEARCHING AND SEMANTICS

The important part of any presentation portal is

searching. Deep Thought uses two different ways to

ﬁnd a document, and third way is under the develop-

ment:

• Fulltext search

• Tagging – It employs usage of user-deﬁned tags

(i.e. words or multi-word concepts) connected

with documents (i.e. wikipages and tickets).

These tags build lightweight database, in which

can be searched. Such database also allows to cre-

ate visual presentation, which shows what concept

is more common, searched more etc. It adds an-

other web 2.0 capability to the system(Golder and

Huberman, 2006).

• Advanced semantic search – Under development

since November 2008. Subproject, solved as a

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

446

diploma thesis, is aimed to incorporate semantic

approach into document processing. It should be

done by modifying the text editor module. Tag-

ging of the text with concepts deﬁned by ontol-

ogy, proposingthem to user automatically, or even

tag the document automatically should be possi-

ble with such modiﬁcations. This tagging can pro-

duce better searching output than user-driven tag-

ging because of formal description of concepts.

Possibility to use of other semantic-driven tech-

niques (visualizations, links to semantic dictio-

naries etc.) belongs also among other beneﬁts

of semantic deﬁnition of document content. This

subproject will collaborate with RDFS-repository

Sesame 2(Aduna Inc., 2008).

7 FUTURE GOALS

System is online, projects from our archive were in-

cluded in the portal, their sites were set up. Por-

tal gives us a possibility to present already ﬁnished

projects, without any management processes, as well

to start new project with full management tools uti-

lization. Further goals in the near future comprises:

• Source code and internationalization actualization

– Trac, which is base of our portal, is active

project and its source code evolved since it has

been used in the DT. Some atributes and functions

of its core were improved. Hence transport of DT

to the actual build of the Trac system would be

an improvement. Such transportation is not easy,

because of numerous changes in source code and

implemented internationalization.

• User rights system modiﬁcation for better usage

outside our faculty – new set of automatically

generated hierarchical rules have to be prepared.

These rules will be shared among the whole sys-

tem, every project, and will build multilevel hier-

archy of user rights. Other goal in this area is to

allow to keep some documents (like wiki pages)

private.

• Further GUI improvement – alternative graphic

design will be created and system will be modiﬁed

to change designs easily. Support for including

the multimedia data (such as mind-maps, ﬂash)

will be add. Higher rate of multimedia usage is

caused by utilizing the system for e-learning.

• Incorporation of semantic-related technologies –

to implement new plugin as described in Search-

ing section). Adding automatic relations between

pictures and text.

8 CONCLUSIONS

Preparation and managing of large amount of research

and in-term students’ projects is challenging and re-

quires formal processing. The introduced tool unites

(without big issues) the older distinctive processes for

different categories of projects and adds new quali-

ties. The system structure and the development pro-

cess enable further modiﬁcations, like Trac plugins

incorporation or new add-ons development.

The paper provides basic overview of Deep

Thought Portal, reasons this system was created, its

structure, characteristics, implemented modules. The

paper also brieﬂy introduces the possibilities of ex-

panding the functionality of the system and describes

basic functions for each declared type of users. It also

describes its cooperation with semantic technologies

and intended usage this advanced functionality in the

searching and enrichment of the stored project data

and metadata.

System Deep Thought can be used in any aca-

demic venue, where bigger amount of developer

projects have to be managed.

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