Hi Lansana ...

Thanks for writing. To be clear, there aren't any others. There is just you
& I, and ... sure, OK --  the other people cc'ed on this email, who ...
might not be very interested in any of this.

As to starting over -- projects that start all over again are rarely better
than the intiali project -- maybe 1 out of 5 times -- this is the industry
average.  The other 4 out of 5 times, projects that start over fail
completely.  So starting over is usually a really bad idea, best done only
if the initial project is so utterly broken that it cannot be saved.

So .. what's the initial project, here? Well,
looking at https://github.com/opencog/atomspace-explorer, I see about
1.5KLOC of javascript.
But that does not include the actual rendering engine, which is located at

https://gitlab.com/icog-labs/atomspace-visualizer

Which gives me a 404 not found. It would seem that the nice folks at icog
labs have deleted the repo. The original authors are ...

   - Mikyas Damtew
   - Kaleab Yitbarek
   - Tsadkan Yitbarek
   - Stephen Sherman

Do you know any of them, perhaps? Their emails? (Are you at icog-labs, or
are you completely unrelated to them?) It would be nice to get a copy of
the git repo ... if not, then maybe I can extract the source code from the
npm package (which still seems to exist)

-- Linas


On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 10:04 AM Lansana Camara <[email protected]> wrote:

> React is a frontend library written on JavaScript. It enables building
> single-page web applications.
>
> CDN is content delivery network. So if you host something on opencog.com
> and someone requests opencog.com from China, the CDN will deliver the
> static HTML from a Chinese server (as opposed to from a US server) for
> optimal speed and page load. It’s in the space of distributed systems.
>
> In regards to rebuilding the current site…without having dug through the
> code (and while taking your description of the unmaintainable mess into
> consideration), I would strongly recommend just nuking everything and
> starting from scratch.
>
> A new git repo with a one-line setup command could be done in a day. The
> ability for people to collaborate on it would be enabled simply by using a
> well-known web UI library like React, and structuring the code such that
> anyone that has any frontend experience will know how to collaborate
> immediately without having to think about it. Again, all of this
> boilerplate can be done in a day.
>
> If you can ping me in 2-4 weeks, I can kick this off and get this done,
> while at the very least leaving space for others to come in and actually
> build out the atomese UI using the foundation that I lay out; I have some
> other deliverables over the next couple of weeks so my time is taken.
>
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 9:35 PM Linas Vepstas <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 3:06 PM Lansana Camara <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Linas,
>>>
>>> I’m not Xabush, but in regards to your question about a web UI…What are
>>> your requirements?
>>>
>>
>> Heh.  Well, my requirements are exactly the three things I listed in the
>> first email: (1) something that beginners can use to explore the atomspace
>> contents, run the example demos. (2) a job control panel  (3) a data
>> explorer.
>>
>>
>>> Building a (globally distributed?) and easily maintainable frontend that
>>> communicates with servers via HTTP or some similar protocol is very easy
>>> for me; this is my expertise. I can start from scratch and have a web UI up
>>> and running on a global CDN in one days time, using open source tech that
>>> is understood by the majority of the frontend community (eg React) which
>>> means that it would be easily maintainable and extensible.
>>>
>>
>> Heh.  You may as well be speaking a foreign language. I don't know what
>> React is or what a CDN is -- or why either of these would be needed. So I
>> don't know how to react to the proposal.
>>
>> Besides the code in the MOZI github directories, there is this:
>>
>> https://github.com/opencog/atomspace-explorer
>>
>> which is written in javascript, and runs inside the browser. It's old and
>> a bit buggy and unmaintained. The demos work, but are filled with obsolete
>> cruft that would need to be cleaned out.  In particular, the demos require
>> an obsolete and unmaintained json file format; it needs to be converted to
>> atomese.
>>
>> This explorer, if it was cleaned up and modernized, could be a reasonable
>> start for fulfilling requirement (1)  ... maybe.
>>
>> The biggest problem with the atomspace explorer is that the code is
>> impenetrable. Almost all of the code in that git repo seems to be a
>> cut-n-paste of other projects, so its very hard to figure out where the
>> actual, useful code is, and what part of it is cruft that could be
>> discarded. So ... I don't know how to deal with things like that. It's
>> frustratingly unmaintainable.
>>
>> The meta-requirement would be that ordinary people could install and run
>> the thing, and use it, and that ordinary programmers could make changes to
>> it. -- add features, enhancements. We're not there yet ...
>>
>> -- Linas
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 26, 2021 at 12:04 PM Linas Vepstas <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Xabush,
>>>
>>> So I have a tough question for you: the MOZI webserver ...
>>>
>>> I'm trying to solve a meta-problem: I want to increase developer
>>> engagement in opencog/atomspace.  For that, it would be nice to have a web
>>> UI. Three of them actually, or four.
>>>
>>> 1) A web UI that allows users to create new atomspaces, and put (by
>>> hand) some atoms into it, and visualize simple graphs. So, people can point
>>> their browser at it, and mess around.
>>>
>>> 2) A job control panel web UI. So, for the language learning project, I
>>> have a collection of bash scripts that start and stop the atomspace, and
>>> ingest text files, and take hours or days to run.  I thought of MOZI
>>> because it has some similar requirements.
>>>
>>> 3) A data explorer. Given an atomspace, with say, millions of atoms
>>> (from language learning, or from biochem), I want to explore what's inside
>>> of it: print all atoms in some cluster, ranked by frequency, or plot some
>>> histogram of mutual information vs frequency or whatever.  Maybe a
>>> kind-of-like jupyter for the atomspace. Again, I think of the MOZI work in
>>> this direction.  You were trying to get a simple web UI for biochemists to
>>> use. I want the same deal, but for linguists. Under the covers, it's all
>>> the same stuff: just atoms in the atomspace.
>>>
>>> How can this be accomplished? You've built some kind of custom solution
>>> for 2 & 3 for MOZI, but I don't understand how to backtrack out of that,
>>> and custom-tailor it so that it works for language learning instead of
>>> ChEBI or PubChem.  Any ideas?
>>>
>>> I mean, you and Hedra have put a lot of effort into these things...
>>>
>>> I see things like this:
>>> https://github.com/MOZI-AI/annotation-service
>>>
>>> and this:
>>> https://github.com/MOZI-AI/annotation-service-ui
>>>
>>> And I'd like to have it work for the kinds of graphs and systems in the
>>> language-learning codebase, instead of biochemistry.  What would it take to
>>> have that work? Do I really have to start from scratch? Is there a way to
>>> recycle any of the work that you've done, and use it for other applications?
>>>
>>> I don't want to go off and state the obvious, but maybe I should go off
>>> and state the obvious: if this web UI stuff was generic, then other users
>>> could use it, which means that other users could show up and help fix bugs
>>> and add features. It would grow the project overall ... it would help
>>> anyone interested in the atomspace and in singularitynet and all that jazz
>>> ...
>>>
>>> BTW, back in the days of Hanson Robotics, we had the same problem ... I
>>> think we throw a lot of money at some Brazillian to create a WebUI for the
>>> Owyl behavior tree subsystem, but .. of course, that code failed with the
>>> AtomSpace, so it was like .. wasted money, wasted effort. .. we still don't
>>> have a generic AtomSpace WebUI ...
>>>
>>> -- Linas
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Patrick: Are they laughing at us?
>>> Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.
>>>
>>>
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>> --
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>> Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.
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-- 
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Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.

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