[Go-essp-tech] Comments on the demo today.

[stephen.pascoe at stfc.ac.uk]

Hi All,

Firstly, a great demo of the P2P system today and I'm glad to see virtually all of the issues I've been nagging you about are being addressed ;-).  Whilst they are on my mind I have some, hopefully constructive, comments.

Metadata: we really need the CIM metadata in there.  A lot of effort has gone into filling out the CIM metadata and the modelling centres won't be happy if it isn't visible along with the data.

Versions & Replicas: As you know these features are critical for the European CMIP5 centres who are committed  to maintain a snapshot for IPCC.   What Luca showed on the JPL node is very exciting and I agree there are lots of UI work that need to happen to make it more intuitive.

Data integrity (checksums and tracking_ids): I think search by checksum or tracking_id is supposed to work but I can't make it happen on the JPL node.  Selecting a BADC dataset that JPL knows about and entering a checksum or tracking_id doesn't produce any hits.  I also hope we can display the checksums in the interface so that users can check them by hand.

Having played with pcmdi9 myself, I actually find the sticky session feature rather confusing.  If I return to it after a few days I don't expect to see my previous search criteria still active.  If I enter text in the "quick search" box I expect it to start a new search, not append it to my current search.  Luca showed how flexible the Results/DataCart system is but it too can be confusing (maybe I just have to get used to it).  I've managed to show odd things like an empty Results tab when there shouldn't be.  Some debugging is still needed.

I noticed that the responsiveness of the pcmdi9 interface was a lot better on the screencast than what I see from my desk in the UK.  It might be that the AJAX techniques used are more susceptible to latency problems than the traditional load-all-at-once model.  I think it will be important to test the software in a federation that includes index nodes on other continents to make sure we don't recreate slow search responses.  I've noticed that viewing the data cart can take a while with a few datasets selected.

I stand by my concern about distributed search.  It would be best to give direct feedback to the user when nodes are offline making clear that this will affect search results.  Users really notice when the number of hits from a search result change and they want to know why.

Cheers,
Stephen.

---
Stephen Pascoe  +44 (0)1235 445980
Centre of Environmental Data Archival
STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot OX11 0QX, UK


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