#bookbrainz-devel

No, I don't either, I'd like to have something more like Wikipedia's talk pages, but that's more complex, so I've left it out for now

I'm still a little concerned that an annotations table would balloon, and I think we should treat disambig like other data since it should be smallish.

Storing them separately should reduce the amount of space they use, rather than increase it

Yeah.

The size of those tables will almost certainly be smaller than the size of the Entity table, since most entities won't have them

My current line of thinking is annotation as ID, disambig as inline data, encourage people to think of annotations as a stopgap for storing information our schema can't yet incorporate and that may be lost down the road if we move to a better system.

(and the ids are set to null in the EntityTree if there's no disambig/annotation)

I'm reluctant to commit to storing an annotations table forever, as something about it makes me sad inside.

Does that seem reasonable?

I still don't see the benefit in storing disambiguations inline, I'm afraid

I don't think we gain from it, and we increase the amount of memory needed

I see it as a rehash of the names table in MB, which proved to be a pain to maintain and turned out to be hard to define semantically. I think we should be storing names inline and I don't think that disambig is materially different from a name as it relates to storage.

We're committing to a certain amount of denormalization with the data table as it stands.

How so?

I thought things were reasonable normalized

Multiple data tables can contain substantially similar data referring to the same entity with only minor changes, and that's intentional.

Well, it's not redundant

The information is in the combinations of aliases/annotation/disambiguation/data

There's no way of storing that which is more efficient than foreign keys to separate tables, and no way we can reduce the duplication without losing the information

ocharles_: kuno: ping, if you're around to give some database-fu

LordSputnik, it also creates a separate join to a generic table which can have an arbitrarily large set of data, which has caused its own set of problems with edits on MB.

The table will never be as large as the edits table, but it carries a performance cost and stores entity-specific information in a generic table.

The EntityData table?

No, the disambiguation table.

graph databases!

We don't store end dates in a separate table referenced by ID because end dates are small and it creates overhead to do a lookup.

Disambig is larger but still relatively small, should still have an upper limit on size, and would also create lookup overhead.

Storing per-entity information in a generic table seems worse to me than small duplications of data.

Oh, so you're suggesting we merge the Disambiguation and EntityData tables

Yes.

That makes more sense

I thought you meant the Disambiguation and EntityTree tables

Oh, sorry. I think I was being really unclear about that.

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure we need to separate EntityTree and EntityData, but I wanted to hear from ocharles_ before I thought any more about that

Since EntityTree is just an entity-type independent way of storing pointers to other tables, and there's no reason EntityData couldn't do that

Here's what I'm thinking, high-level, in terms of data structures:

So, I'd suggest we keep that as it is for now, until I've discussed that with ocharles_

Oh go on

oshit

An Entity is a structure with an ID, a type, a rooted tree, and a node pointer associated with it. Each node of the rooted tree is a revision, which contains an edit note, a date, a pointer to a parent node, and a pointer to the data which makes up that revision. The node pointer on the entity points to the current master revision node.

restarting the entire network right now

Leftmost: let me draw that

Leftmost: ok, where are aliases?

Not sure offhand. That was a very high-level picture and I'm still not used to the idea of putting aliases in a separate table.

Ok, so, it doesn't group revisions together at all

No, only by parent.

But if we're not voting I guess we don't really need edits to group things?

Application of an edit is accomplished by moving the master revision pointer.

Oh, I mean, in the current schema, edits are groups of revisions which get applied together

Right, I meant in my schema.

Ok, I think this would work, but we still have the issue of storing different data for different entity types

Not necessarily. Our entity structure can store type without using a typed tree.

bb.org back up

Each EntityData structure is associated with only a single Entity, so everything up to that point can be generic.

Well, what would the EntityData for each revision contain?

Any type-agnostic revision information and a pointer to a type-specific data struct.

So, like an EntityTree is now?

Yes, similar.

So, the main difference is in the organisation of revisions, then

(and also presumably storing annotations and disambiguations inline in the entity-type agnostic data)

Yeah.

Right, I'll think about that

Let's go onto the final few topics

SSH

yeah

Leftmost: in order to set you up on the bb.org sandbox, I need the public SSH keys for the PCs you want to connect from (there's no password authentication afaik)

So I guess the best way to do that would be in an email

Ok, next is Search (who wanted to talk about that?)

I did.

btw Leo_Verto: if you wanted SSH access to the bookbrainz server, we can probably sort that out too (although I should probably check with ruaok first)

I've looked into it and it seems that solr and elasticsearch largely comes down to preference. I've got some experience with elasticsearch. It's dead easy to use and dead easy to get running. Any objection to moving forward with an ES search implementation?

No objection here

probably not essential but could be useful in certain situations

Ok, I'll ask him next Monday, when he's not so busy (hopefully)

Leftmost: either way I'd have to learn one or the other, and if it's easy to set up, we can probably switch between them without too much fuss if we really need to

LordSputnik, public key sent.

*decrypting transmission*

Leftmost: ok, I'll see what I can do when I have a proper internet connection again

Finally, Setup (also you, Leftmost?) :)

Yep.

Just a general note that we should work on making setup easier. I don't know if I mentioned that yesterday.

nope

What bits particularly?

I thought it was fairly straightforward (especially compared to MB)

mhm

It wasn't difficult or confusing, but I think in general it could be smoother.

the frontend setup is pretty well documented by now

so, currently, you have to install bbschema, install postgres and redis, then clone bbws

Install dependencies with pip, then launch the ws

oh yeah, installing redis is entirely undocumented

The READMEs for each component should include a short setup howto and any system reqs, I'd say, and -schema or -ws should be able to set up the database with only a user/password to its name.

Clone the site, npm install the dependencies, compile the javascript, then launch the site

Ok, currently database setup is done in a separate script in bbschema

I got it set up without difficulty, just things that may be worth keeping in mind.

we could move that somewhere else, maybe, or try to integrate it with the ws config file

if we get the config system done, we could provide configs for having a whole local setup or just working on the site using the bb.org ws

(or have a separate bbschema config file containing the database settings?)

It probably belongs in -ws if -schema is just a lib for interacting purely with the schema instead of making database calls.

Well, that's the thing...

I've just started moving some of the editing logic into schema

There's a blurry line between them

Hmm. That may be worth some thought, then.

Ok, anything else for discussion today?

Not that I can think of. Do you wanna think over the -ws/-schema split and talk about it next meeting, maybe?

Ok, should we aim for 9:30 next time?

I can do the publisher/edition forms provided the ws endpoint exists

Sounds good to me. Same bat time (plus ten minutes), same bat channel?

Leo_Verto: yes, it does - same endpoint as the creator/publisher ones

unless we want to hold that off until after the new call model

Leftmost: haha yeah

ah good

Leftmost: do you still have some time now?

I do.

Ok, I think we can resolve the differences between your new proposed schema and our current one

Leo_Verto, up to you. It may be next meeting before I even have PRs up for discussion on frontend stuff, and new changes should be relatively easy to integrate.

So, your proposal has revisions organised in a tree for each entity, which is optimal for parallel revisions being merged, right?

oh, one more thing

I want to start working on better accessability of the site

stuff like adding title texts for icons

Go for it, that's always welcome

LordSputnik, right.

labels for screenreaders are also helpful, but I've been leaving them out up until now :(

Leo_Verto, please do. I even have an accessibility consultant if you want feedback.

is there a proper way to implement those labels?

(My father is blind.)

Leftmost: is better support for merging parallel work the only reason for using a tree rather than a list of revisions?

There is. I can get you more information by tomorrow if you want.

LordSputnik, off the top of my head, yeah.

Leo_Verto: there's something like an "aria-*" attribute - it's documented in bootstrap, I think

Leftmost, you should join our mailing list https://groups.io/org/groupsio/bookbrainz-devel...

There's also form labelling stuff baked into HTML, I believe.

Okay.

Leftmost: ok, so which one we use should depend on whether we need that level of detail in the revision history

oh and I also want to add a nice button to the editor page to send a message, the problem here is vertically centering the button

LordSputnik, I think it's a useful concept. It's a very simple data structure, it's list-like if there's no parallel editing, and it makes it easier for multiple changes to be made and merged.

It's also very adaptable in terms of how we choose to display this to the end user.

Ok

I've been doing a lot of data structures reading lately, so my mind may still be there. :)

Second thing is- do we really want edits/merge requests *and* revisions

I don't see the need myself.

Assuming the primary way of peer review is through verifying data, rather than reviewing edits, I don't think so either

So, we have a tree of revisions, no edits, and I'd assume that revisions can be reverted easily

Yep. A revert would basically just a new revision with an old dataset.

Leftmost: wouldn't it just be setting the master_revision further down the tree?

OH

* Oh, no I guess you'd want a note too

rather than silently changing history