Abstract
Indico, CERN’s popular open-source tool for event management, is in widespread use among facilities that make up the HEP community. It is extensible through a robust plugin architecture that provides features such as search and video conferencing integration. In 2018, Indico version 2 was released with many notable improvements, but without a full-featured search functionality that could be implemented easily outside of CERN. At both Fermi and Brookhaven National Laboratories, the user community viewed the lack of this popular feature as a significant impediment to deployment of the new software. In the meantime, CERN embarked upon a major redesign of their core search service, one that would also necessitate a rewrite of the Indico search interface. Seeing this pressing need, the two US labs decided to collaborate, with assistance from the CERN development team, on a project to develop the requisite search functionality for the larger user community. The resulting design exploits the simplified schema defined in the new CERN Search micro-service, based on Invenio and Elasticsearch, while still providing a flexible path to implementation for alternative backend search services. It is intended to provide a software package that can be installed easily and used out of the box, by anyone at any site. This paper will discuss the design choices and architectural challenges, and provide an overview of the deployment and use of these new plugins.
Highlights
Indico is an open-source event management system, popular in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community
Indico v1.9 – v2.2: CERN itself moved towards a solution which uses an internallyavailable custom solution based on SharePoint, while the officially available Invenio plugin fell into disuse for lack of a maintainer
The CERN solution plugins send search metadata using the MARCXML Standards and search results are displayed by SharePoint
Summary
Indico is an open-source event management system, popular in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. Indico’s extensibility through its plugin architecture provides integrated event fee payment (via PayPal), video conferencing, search, room booking etc. That can be modified and/or extended to suit the specific needs of a particular institute. The latest version of Indico v2.x [4][5] has been re-written to use modern Python packages (Flask, SQLAlchemy, marshmallow etc.) and to use PostgreSQL for its database. The Fermi-BNL-CERN collaboration was formed to build the search plugins utilizing the new CERN Search microservice and make them available to the community as an deployable solution
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