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| th1a | jinty: hi. | 18:06 |
|---|---|---|
| jinty | hey! | 18:09 |
| jinty | timetabling time? | 18:09 |
| th1a | Si. | 18:09 |
| jinty | Ok, where should we start | 18:10 |
| jinty | Have you looked at the imaginary timetabler? | 18:10 |
| th1a | I've looked at it. | 18:10 |
| th1a | My wife forgot to reset the alarm clock after she went to school, so I just woke up. | 18:11 |
| th1a | I'm a little woozy. | 18:11 |
| jinty | ok, no worries. Then I'll just explain where I'm at | 18:12 |
| th1a | Great. | 18:12 |
| jinty | and what I think to do next | 18:12 |
| th1a | Sounds good. | 18:13 |
| jinty | Ok, I tried, with the imaginary timetabler, to put something concrete on the ground. | 18:13 |
| jinty | A superstructure with enough inbuilt layers of indirection to cope with most problems. | 18:13 |
| jinty | The fundamental concept is to store and manipulate the data on a basic level in the most generic way possible. Similar to the always store time in UTC and convert on view | 18:15 |
| th1a | OK. | 18:15 |
| jinty | miniTTML I kept separate as this is more of a general library, which I hope will be used by the solvers | 18:16 |
| jinty | as well | 18:16 |
| th1a | OK. | 18:16 |
| jinty | But the major problem still is the risk. A lot is at stake if TTML does not live up to it's promise | 18:17 |
| jinty | also, importing from schooltool could be difficult. | 18:17 |
| th1a | Yes. Actually, that brings us to something that I wanted to mention. | 18:17 |
| jinty | go for it | 18:18 |
| th1a | Looking for the URL now... | 18:18 |
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| th1a | Grumble grumble. | 18:20 |
| jinty | he he | 18:20 |
| faassen | hello. | 18:20 |
| th1a | Articles about the thing but not the thing itself. | 18:20 |
| faassen | can anybody tell me how far the zope3-ification of schoobell trunk is along? i.e. enough to install it and have it do something, or not yet at that stage? | 18:21 |
| th1a | http://www.elframework.org:80/ | 18:21 |
| th1a | faassen: You can install it and have it do something. | 18:21 |
| mgedmin | faassen, you can drop the schoolbell package into PYTHONPATH, include its zcml, and then add schoolbell instances in your Zope 3 | 18:22 |
| mgedmin | it is not fully functional yet, but you can play with it in Zope 3 | 18:22 |
| jinty | faassen: don't use setup.py install - that doen't work yet | 18:23 |
| th1a | jinty: As you can see from the site, the "elf" folks are trying to pull together web services and other standards related to e-learning, including a vacant slot for timetabling: http://www.elframework.org/user_agents/timetabling | 18:23 |
| * jinty goes and looks | 18:24 | |
| faassen | I won't use setup.py install. | 18:24 |
| faassen | mgedmin: thanks | 18:24 |
| th1a | jinty: here's a quote from an email from someone who works on elf: | 18:25 |
| th1a | I'm still getting agreement from our international partners about ELF, | 18:25 |
| th1a | but once we've agreed the governance structure we're going to put out | 18:25 |
| th1a | the call to get everyone contributing their expertise - the idea is | 18:25 |
| th1a | that as a community we identify service that we're interested in, and | 18:25 |
| th1a | propose tools, standards, and proto-standards (i.e. the REST interfaces | 18:25 |
| th1a | we've cooked up ourselves) for discussion, which the funding agencies | 18:25 |
| th1a | (in the UK, Australia and Canada initially) can then turn into official | 18:25 |
| th1a | guidance. | 18:25 |
| jinty | Looks like our spec would fit in there nicely | 18:27 |
| jinty | as a first draft | 18:27 |
| th1a | Yes. | 18:28 |
| jinty | what do they want to achieve? | 18:29 |
| th1a | Interoperability. | 18:29 |
| th1a | CETIS is useful in particular because they're, as an institution, somewhat skeptical of the super-complex IMS specs for eLearning. | 18:31 |
| th1a | Which even I run in fear from. | 18:31 |
| jinty | what are the IMS specs?? why run in fear | 18:31 |
| th1a | OK, so eLearning is all about doing online learning, which we aren't directly interested in, but it is closely related. | 18:32 |
| th1a | But there is potential for immense amounts of money to be made from online delivery of educational content. | 18:33 |
| th1a | Especially if it can be done in a modular, interoperable way. | 18:33 |
| th1a | a la carte, if you will. | 18:33 |
| jinty | Timetabling, from my perspective, doesn't seem to be content | 18:33 |
| th1a | So that if I know I want to learn skill "foo," I can purchase modules that teach that exact thing from a number of companies and universities. | 18:34 |
| th1a | jinty: we'll make it back to timetabling... | 18:34 |
| jinty | Seems like something a lot of people are interested in, I saw somebody trying to do about the same. | 18:35 |
| th1a | So... in an attempt to get that kind of interoperability, there are several big interlocking efforts. | 18:35 |
| th1a | The military is also a player in this game, since they have complex training requirements. | 18:36 |
| th1a | Anyhow... | 18:36 |
| th1a | So IMS is the biggest body of specs. | 18:36 |
| jinty | As do all large organizations, and they have money. | 18:36 |
| th1a | And in particular they have "IMS Enterprise" which covers stuff which is directly related to SchoolTool. | 18:37 |
| th1a | So IMS Enterprise has, for example, SOAP bindings for fetching a list of students in a class. | 18:37 |
| jinty | Ah, penny drops. The administration system facilitates the delivery of content | 18:38 |
| jinty | administering it, if you will | 18:38 |
| th1a | But you're immediately stepping not only into SOAP, but this whole body of giant standards documents. | 18:38 |
| th1a | Yeah, the administration system has a role. | 18:38 |
| th1a | For example, in SchoolTool, if there is a certain requirement for a student to graduate that is defined as a standard, | 18:39 |
| jinty | e.g. has to pass a certain combination of classes | 18:40 |
| th1a | and the student fulfills the requirement via an online class instead of a regular class, we'd like to receive that info from the elearning client in the standard manner. | 18:40 |
| th1a | Particularly if we can do so via REST, rather than SOAP. | 18:40 |
| th1a | So basically, SchoolTool's point of view is that we want to support interoperability, but we want to promote simpler interoperability standards than IMS. | 18:41 |
| th1a | And its ilk. | 18:41 |
| jinty | Ah, ok. | 18:42 |
| th1a | But we'd also like someone else to someday add full IMS support. It just isn't something Mark is likely to pay for. | 18:42 |
| th1a | So the guys at CETIS share this point of view in general. | 18:42 |
| th1a | They tend to point to things like RSS and iCalendar as more useful standards than the massive IMS type of things. | 18:43 |
| jinty | They will or have generate their own standards? | 18:44 |
| jinty | Are we going to play a part in this? | 18:45 |
| th1a | Well, it seems like ELF is something we could play a part in. | 18:45 |
| th1a | Since, for example, they have some interest in timetabling standards. | 18:45 |
| th1a | And it would suck if they blessed something other than TTML. | 18:46 |
| th1a | Not that they have huge pull, but it would be a good indication of what way the wind is blowing. | 18:46 |
| jinty | TTML is more of an idea than a standard. | 18:46 |
| jinty | i.e. use MathML to define the constraints. | 18:47 |
| th1a | Yeah. It doesn't seem like anything else is floating around. | 18:47 |
| jinty | the MathML wind is very strong | 18:47 |
| th1a | I've only heard good things about it. | 18:48 |
| jinty | wolfram, mathcad, almost all browsers are behind it. | 18:48 |
| jinty | wolfram is the important one | 18:48 |
| th1a | Actually, here's a good quote about ELF: The intention is not to provide a blueprint for an open-source solution, but rather to facilitate the integration of commercial, home-grown, and open source components and applications within institutions and regional federations, by agreeing common service definitions, data models, and protocols. | 18:49 |
| th1a | Hm. Poking around... maybe there is an IMS Enterprise spec for timetabling. | 18:50 |
| th1a | http://www.brock.ac.uk/blogs/jon/PermaLink,guid,8d44008f-c9c3-4676-8e1b-fd95311f9407.aspx | 18:50 |
| th1a | he says "i spent about 4 hours trying to understand and debug the IMS Enterprise Web Services WSDL files and schema yesterday. when i left the building (yes late) i felt like i'd given myself Asperger's syndrome" | 18:52 |
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| th1a | The objective here is to not make ourselves autistic. | 18:52 |
| jinty | he he | 18:53 |
| jinty | not something I am interested in | 18:53 |
| th1a | I should probably email that guy. | 18:53 |
| jinty | when they talk about timetabling data, what do they mean? | 18:54 |
| th1a | Good question. | 18:54 |
| jinty | does it include the definition of constraints | 18:54 |
| th1a | Actually it is unlikely that it does. | 18:54 |
| jinty | or is it just how to represent a timetable | 18:54 |
| th1a | In fact, that is probably all they're talking about anyhow. | 18:55 |
| th1a | In which case this entire thread of conversation is a dead end. | 18:55 |
| th1a | So let's drop it for the moment. | 18:55 |
| jinty | It's inetesting from the point of view of how to convert from this standard into something more suitable for a solver | 18:56 |
| th1a | Let's get back to what you've been writing. | 18:56 |
| jinty | that should be looked at now, so that the probems im solving now can take it into account | 18:56 |
| th1a | I'll investigate further. | 18:57 |
| jinty | Thanks, if I can look at the data formats they use it would really help. | 18:57 |
| th1a | Do you know anything about SOAP? | 18:58 |
| jinty | Not a clue, I tend to avoid jargon | 18:58 |
| th1a | It's the more heavy-weight way to do web services. | 18:58 |
| th1a | Favored by Microsoft, Sun, etc. | 18:59 |
| jinty | now define web services:) | 18:59 |
| th1a | Turns out that whenever someone like Amazon exposes the same services via REST and SOAP, 80-90% of developers use REST. | 18:59 |
| th1a | Passing XML over HTTP. | 18:59 |
| th1a | i.e., fetching an XML list of students in a class. | 19:00 |
| th1a | Or passing timetable constraints in TTML. | 19:00 |
| th1a | Over HTTP. | 19:00 |
| jinty | My point with the timetabler is to try to isolate this code into the sources, so that the core doesn't have to care about how it gets the data | 19:01 |
| th1a | Right. | 19:01 |
| jinty | It's the core I want to prove works right now. | 19:01 |
| th1a | Right. Lets get back to that. I have to go in about 20 minutes. I've got a doctor's appointment. | 19:02 |
| jinty | I don't want to get distracted by the other things becuse I know they are solvable problems. The greatest concentration of risk is the core | 19:02 |
| th1a | Yes. | 19:03 |
| jinty | especially the TTML part | 19:03 |
| jinty | basically how I see the core working, is that everything is stored in object form | 19:05 |
| jinty | directly translatable to and from XML | 19:05 |
| jinty | because XML can be completely expressed by objects | 19:05 |
| th1a | Right. | 19:06 |
| jinty | This format is very general, and probably completely non-understandable to the average user | 19:06 |
| jinty | but, when you deal with a more specific problems, you can make some assumptions | 19:07 |
| jinty | such as, a classroom scheduling problem will always only have 3 domains: Teachers, classes and time slots | 19:07 |
| jinty | using these problem specific assumptions, you can come up with a usable GUI. I hope! | 19:08 |
| th1a | Sure. | 19:08 |
| th1a | I'm getting more optimistic that it could be done well in a browser with some clever Javascript. | 19:09 |
| jinty | Thats another thing I'm not thinking of - exactly what type of gui:) | 19:10 |
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| th1a | So the biggest question at hand is whether or not our most fundamental modeling of the problem is adequate? | 19:11 |
| jinty | exactly. everything else is surely solvable and contains no risk. | 19:11 |
| th1a | Are you, in the end, interested in writing an optimization algorithm yourself? | 19:12 |
| jinty | I have been speaking to Tomaz (tablix) about it | 19:12 |
| jinty | He was thinking of making TTML an input format. But the e-mail contact is patchy, so I don't know the situation | 19:13 |
| jinty | It is very different from what he is doing right now | 19:13 |
| th1a | Is that all C? | 19:14 |
| th1a | Tablix? | 19:14 |
| jinty | yep | 19:14 |
| th1a | I wonder if we could just wrap it in Python somehow, rather than writing a TTML parser in C. | 19:15 |
| jinty | another option may be to write a tablix module that is generated from a TTML file. But this is a blue sky right now. | 19:15 |
| th1a | OK. I think I understand where I should focus some attention. | 19:17 |
| jinty | From my understanding of them, a genetic algorithim only needs to be told when a constraint is violated and how badly. I am thinking of an addition to miniTTML that would do just that. | 19:17 |
| jinty | It would also be usefull for letting the GUI know when a constraint is violated | 19:17 |
| * jinty is not sure if he is making sense anymore | 19:18 | |
| th1a | More or less. | 19:19 |
| th1a | I need to run, however. | 19:19 |
| jinty | ok, till later, I'll try to get some stuff on the ground when I have time | 19:20 |
| th1a | All right. I'll send out some inquiries about IMS Enterprise and timetabling. | 19:20 |
| th1a | Good news about that Zope Mag article. Are you getting paid for that? | 19:21 |
| jinty | yep! | 19:21 |
| th1a | Excellent. | 19:21 |
| jinty | also sounds like it could be a longer relationship | 19:22 |
| th1a | Great. | 19:22 |
| th1a | OK, I have to find out whether I've got chronic low-grade bronchitis or chronic low-grade pneumonia. | 19:22 |
| jinty | good luck! At least both are low-grade | 19:23 |
| th1a | Yeah. I've just been coughing intermittently for two months. | 19:23 |
| th1a | ttyl. | 19:23 |
| jinty | ouch! | 19:23 |
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