EDC Workbench

This page shall collect ideas about the web application (web user interface), that allows the user to interact with the FederatedSearch and other related components, with the core use case being a combined metadata and content query. Tightly related is the aspect of displaying (the found) resources, aka ResourceViewer.

There is already an external wiki-page about this topic (​vronk.net EDC-Workbench). It is slightly outdated and rather superficial, but a good starting point. It sees EDC-Workbench as an integrated research environment for work with Language Resources, incorporating also a Content Processing-component. While this still can be seen as a reference architecture and a long-term vision, currently we want to concentrate on the searching and displaying aspect.

Requirements

customizable UI

The UI has to be flexible/customizable, i.e. it shall be possible to configure the layout of the user interface, by adding, removing or moving around of individual "blocks" - parts of the user interface.

Viewer, ResourceViewer

aka Panel, Container - is the basic building block, to build the full user interface from. Provided with a piece of data this viewer should be able to display it in some way. More on this under Viewable.

Atomic view

In general individual views (parts of a composite UI) shall be addressable individually.

Typing

different types of data require different ways of displaying them. There are also often multiple ways of displaying the same data.

Linking

Viewer can update another Viewer (link from one to the other). This may need to be brokered by the "container" or some "manager", that knows which viewer is suited for which type of data. That shouldn't be something individual Viewer should implement or even need to know.

Interactivity

It has to be possible to manipulate the application (other blocks) from within one block. (Can this be seen as some special outbound linking? - Sending commands to the containing application))

Integrated viewer

is part of the application (ie it can be used directly within a "panel" of the application)

External viewer

is a separate application (possibly even served from another server). It should be able to process remote data (passed by URI-reference in the request (or via POST)).

Comparative/Differential? views

More-or-less independent of the type of resource one required configuration is to be able to put two (or more) Resources/Views? next to each other, to be able to directly compare them. This can be syntax sentences, trees, but also images or charts. In the simplest solution one could just put two viewers next to each other, feeding them with different (to be compared) resources. However with some resources, more sophisticated diff-views are needed the synchronize the two views and possibly highlight alignements.

Combined Metadata Content Search

There is separate page about CDMDC, but that is more concerned with the webservice. Here we can work on the embedment of metadata and content search within the Workbench web application.

Open Issues

• What Framework to use for the implementation? (Preference for Java/JavaScript?)
• We may need a way of referencing and managing "Temporary Resources".