What are we up to?

Wondering what's going on with the NPT project?
The easiest way to find out it to take a look at our Roadmap! It gives our followers an overview of the main milestones and where we are at the moment.
Right now, advanced technical documentation is in preparation, following up the release of the NPT Scoping and Requirements document, to ensure the development phase rolls and that minimal space is left for questioning and doubts for the developers. This demands in-depth analysis (reality checks) of the available tools, standards, data, modules, components, other technical and human contraints, etc... and will shape the overall design of the NPT.
The next outcome is an NPT SRS (Software Requirements Specification) document, detailing interface requirements and system features, which will be followed by a Software Design Document.
At the same time, discussion are ongoing to reconcile a team of developers that will get their hands in the grease and make it happen.
If you have any questions or comments, you can contact the NPT coordinator directly, or use this Blog, or the Google Code website to inject your feedback (which is most welcome!).

NPT Mindmaps

An interactive mindmap is available for all to visualize a series of components of the future NPT. The mindmap mainly focuses on the requirements, and front/backend functionalities of the Toolkit. As usual, comments and feedback are more than welcome!

Requirement 15: Exploration of APIs

Availability of APIs and Web Services. The design and creation of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that expose NPT functions should be explored to allow third parties to use NPT functionalities. Web services should also be explored.

Requirement 14: Sustainability

Sustainability embedded at each stage of development.  The developers of the NPT should be mindful of the strategic implications of development choices to the long term sustainability of the NPT in a number of key areas: underlying hardware and software; development tools and frameworks; level of effort for system administrators and portal managers; level of interest and engagement of users, including researchers, data providers and other interested visitors.  

Requirement 13: Simplicity

Simple to maintain. Maintenance in terms of user interface configuration, user rights management, and data source(s) customisation should be done at the management level with visual tools. The installation, operation and maintenance at the system administrator level should be well documented and administrator manuals and guidelines should be carefully provided. 

Requirement 12: Discoverability

Discoverable through search engines. The NPT should have appropriate html metadata tags that allow the portal itself to be discovered through search engines. Those metatags should be populated with metadata that allow portals to be distinguished from each other, for example as they deal with distinct themes, regions, or countries. Metadata made available to search engines should aim primarily at making the data easily discoverable through e.g. Google. 

Requirement 11: Tracability

Capability to efficiently track portal usage and database content statistics. Both end-users and portal managers should be able to view statistics about the portal usage. Statistics can include number of hits, number of occurrences, number of new records monthly, number of queries, number of downloads, total number of downloaded records. In the case of data downloads, there should be brief metrics collected on how the data are used.