[SGVLUG] Meeting recap 4/14: Webification + May/June meetingannouncement

Fri Apr 15 13:17:37 PDT 2016

Thankyou, Lan for all the work you do. Thank you for the marvelous recap 
which gives me a flavor of what I missed, without the stress of my brain 
exploding while I tried to understand someone on the subject. It was just 
way beyond me, but would have been juicy to lots of my tech friends. I am 
glad you had a good turnout. I was curious, even though I could tell I would 
not understand the lecture, I hate missing out. You satisfied my curiosity.
Thanks so much, see you soon,
Cheri

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lan Dang via SGVLUG" <sgvlug at sgvlug.net>
To: "SGV LUG Mailing List" <sgvlug at sgvlug.org>
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2016 11:40 AM
Subject: [SGVLUG] Meeting recap 4/14: Webification + May/June 
meetingannouncement

> Hi all,
>
>
> Announcement: I need a break.  The SGVLUG functional anarchy is in charge 
> of the May/June meetings.
>
> tl;dr Thank you Bobby and Akash and Wendell from OpenX.  We had about 56 
> folks show up--lot of new and returning people. Zhangfan's goal with his 
> talk was to excite community interest in webification and he appeared to 
> be successful. Swante gave away leftover t-shirts acquired at SCALE.  We 
> had fun talking to each other after the event.  People went to Du-Par's 
> afterwards.
>
> The webification* notes may help for people who had issues following the 
> talk as the audio volume was variable depending on whether Zhangfan was 
> using the microphone or facing the audience.
>
>
> Lan
>
>
> ANNOUNCEMENT
> ============
> I am burnt out.  I'm taking a break from organizing the May and June 
> SGVLUG meetings. I am relying on the functional anarchy that is SGVLUG to 
> pick up the slack.  All I am going to do is show up on the day and enjoy 
> hanging out with people.
>
>
> The May meeting will be at Du-Par's and consist of short talks by LUG 
> members.  The Meetup page has already been updated:
>
> http://www.meetup.com/SGVTech/events/229463153/
>
> The June meeting will be Peter Linnell speaking on Open Build Service.  I 
> believe James is his contact and that Peter has to travel to come speak 
> with us.  I am unclear how much of the logistics have been handled.  Last 
> I heard, the venue has not been determined yet.
>
>
>
> LINKS
> =====
>
> * Webification slides - http://scifari.org/talk/talk-20160414.pptx
>
> * NASA Space Apps Challenge Pasadena info - http://bit.ly/1oanT7H (writeup 
> by Lan with links to resources and the videos from the past two kick-off 
> meetings)
>
> * SGVLUG website contains links to our mailing list, twitter, etc - 
> http://sgvlug.org
>
> * Hackaday Los Angeles has cool talks and events for makers and 
> inventors - http://www.meetup.com/Hackaday-Los-Angeles/
>
>
>
> ATTENDANCE
> ==========
> I'm listing the attendance stats because it's helpful in guestimating 
> actual turnout.
>
> According to our sign-in sheet, there were about 58 people, of which 7 
> were marked as OpenX employees, who don't normally RSVP.  We had a total 
> of 55 positive RSVPs on Meetup with about 15 no-shows. There were 2 RSVPs 
> with me, 6 SGVLUG members who didn't RSVP, and 4 people were walk-ins.
>
>
> I saw a lot of familiar faces as well as a lot of new faces.
>
>
>
> INTRO
> =====
>
> Despite the very last-minute promotion** for this month's SGVLUG meeting 
> and it turning out to be just me running the meeting, the event turned out 
> rather well.  Bless Bobby and Akash and Wendell for having everything 
> setup and providing A/V support.
>
>
>
> I had OpenX start off the night.  Bobby gave his spiel for OpenX and 
> mentioned that they are currently hiring for Site Reliability Engineers.
>
>
> I had to be emcee and run Linux in the News.  Not my favorite role.  At 
> least I gave people a very thorough introduction to SGVLUG 
> website/twitter/mailing list and also talked about the umbrella nature of 
> our SGVTech Meetup group.  Also announced the NASA Space Apps Challenge 
> which is happening next weekend.
>
>
> Thank you Carlos, Jaime, and others who provided Linux in the News items, 
> discussions, and clarifications.
>
>
> There were some great questions during the talk, and a lot of people 
> lingered to chat with each other afterwards.  We finally got them out of 
> the door so they could continue their conversations at Du-Par's.
>
>
> WEBIFICATION
> ============
>
> Zhangfan's talk was actually called "Simplify Data Use on Web Platform" 
> and the core of it is the concept of "webification" or w10n.  It is a 
> topic that is very close to his heart and that he has been fortunate 
> enough to take from a hobby project to a technology that is currently 
> being used in a variety of places at NASA.  What was obvious during his 
> talk was that he has a lot of passion and vision for w10n, but he is too 
> busy to pursue it.
>
>
> His goal in speaking at SGVLUG is to excite the interest of the open 
> source community and take this concept beyond NASA, and his last slide 
> basically says "Seeking help from enthusiasts to move to next level."
>
> The idea behind webification is to provide a simple API for people to 
> access data via a semantic URL.  Webification is a specification, and 
> while he has developed software implementations of it, people can develop 
> their own or extend his software.  He doesn't believe there are any limits 
> to what you can webify.  As long as you can map it to a tree structure of 
> nodes and leaves, you should be able to webify it.
>
> This ties into his work with w10n-sci, or an application of w10n to 
> scientific data, which comes in formats like images, NetCDF or HDF5***, 
> and tend to span multiple files and take up gigabytes and terabytes of 
> disk space.  In the past, scientists have had to mirror this data to their 
> local servers to run analysis on it and they would have to write software 
> to read in the data, pull out the fields they want, and reformat that into 
> a more useful format for them to do their analysis.
>
> Wouldn't it be wonderful if, instead, they could just go to the provider 
> site, make a request via URL and retrieve only the data they are 
> interested in and have it be returned in a standard format like CSV or 
> JSON?  You can extend this and ask, wouldn't it be even nicer if there was 
> some kind of web widget that could interface with the data, and all they 
> would have to do is to navigate to a URL and be able to display their data 
> selection on a map or a lineplot?
>
>
> The above pretty much describes his demo.
>
>
>
> He laid out a specification that fits on one slide, which Liz commemorated 
> here:
> https://twitter.com/LearningNerd/status/720814051148713984
> There are three categories of users for webification:
>
> * the data providers  - to expose their data in a user-friendly way
>
> * the developers aka the data innovators - to build the cool 
> visualizations, web widgets and/or tools
>
> * the end users - who analyze or consume the data
>
>
> It was a pretty personal talk as well.  We learned that he did his 
> undergraduate work in China, his graduate work in Holland and was at 
> Caltech for some time before eventually going to JPL.   The concept of 
> webification is something he had developed back in 1999, during a 
> half-year time period when he was applying for a green card, but his visa 
> had expired, so he was not allowed to work.  He started work in scientific 
> modelling****  His big break came when they had difficulty disseminating 
> the huge quantities of data they were generating.  He has a background in 
> both science and IT, so he was able  to cobble up a solution using his old 
> hobby project of webification.
>
>
> His programming background is in Java and Python and he whimsically names 
> his software after fruit, and they start with a P if they are Python-based 
> and a J if they are Java-based. He is a great believer in Unix philosophy.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
>
> You should check out the slides.  They are minimalist and contain all the 
> links necessary to get started with webification as well as his contact 
> info, if you want to help him take it to the next level.  There are a 
> bunch of links to NASA open datasets that support webification. He has 
> links to a couple of public web widgets that you could use to browse and 
> visualize this data.  Or a clever developer could build some pretty 
> awesome visualizations or applications based on this webified data.
>
>
>
> FOOTNOTES
> =========
>
> * I am a big fan of w10n and its potential and have talked to Zhangfan 
> many times about it; my summary is going to contain a few extra details 
> that may not have come out during the talk.
>
>
>
> ** My goal with these Meetups we do at OpenX is to provide an appropriate 
> audience for our speaker, who may be talking about a particularly niche 
> topic.  I do very targeted promotions to the communities who may be 
> interested in this topic.  This month, I targeted folks at JPL, the Learn 
> to Code LA community, the folks excited about the NASA Space Apps 
> Challenge, CS students from PCC, and the local Big Data group.  Judging by 
> the level of questions, I was pretty successful.
>
> *** NetCDF and HDF5 are data formats that are popular with scientists. 
> NetCDF is a simpler format and is very popular with the scientific 
> modelling community.  HDF5 basically allows you to put whatever you want 
> into the file and can be challenging for scientists to read, depending on 
> how complicated the structure is and how well their implementation or 
> programming language supports HDF5.
>
>
> a) NetCDF is a set of software libraries and self-describing, 
> machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and 
> sharing of array-oriented scientific data.
> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/
>
> b) HDF5 is a data model, library, and file format for storing and managing 
> data. It supports an unlimited variety of datatypes, and is designed for 
> flexible and efficient I/O and for high volume and complex data.
>
> https://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/
>
> **** There was a point in his talk where he mentioned modelling and 
> observational data.  Scientific modelling is about analyzing a bunch of 
> data and coming up with a model to explain a certain phenomenon.  There is 
> a level of abstraction to them.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_modelling
>
> Observational data refer to data based on actual measurements, usually 
> taken by instruments or sensors on spacecraft or aircraft.  (Or robotic 
> geologists on Mars.)
>
> END RECAP
>
> 