A strong team of nine Cognifide employees attended the adaptTo() conference held in Berlin last week—adaptTo() is a meeting focused on technical aspects of Apache Sling, Jackrabbit and Adobe CQ. The conference held stage to a number of interesting presentations—including two from Cognifide—which provided a wealth of useful information.

The subject area of these talks was divided into five main categories: new features and products, thoughts on designing a proper content structure, real-life user stories, advanced technical details and basic concept explanation. In this post I will summarise these subjects. All presentations are available on the conference page.

1. New features and products

I am pretty excited by the new CRUD interface in Apache Sling. Finally we won’t have to use JCR API to write nodes and properties while reading it with ResourceResolver. The second interesting feature is the new ResourceProvider API which allows us to expose any data (e.g. a file system or RDBMS data) with the resource interface. Guys from pro!vision presented this in practice, exposing a Hibernate-accessed Oracle database as a subtree resource. CRUD was fully supported, of course.

Apache Oak is a ‘new Jackrabbit’ and looks very interesting. Oak will offer a new, modular design based on a microkernel paradigm, a plugin interface (in fact, most of the Oak features are implemented as plugins) and the truly distributed architecture. What is more, both the storage layer and the access layer can be changed, so you can have your data physically written to MongoDB or Oracle and access it using JCR, WebDAV, etc.

Cognifide gave two talks. Łukasz and Kuba presented the Slice framework—a magically easy way to write CQ application. I talked about Sling Dynamic Include which allows the dispatcher to put some dynamic content into a cached page. However stressful the presentation was to me, I found the audience kind and interested.

2. Benefits of a well designed content structure

A subject which came up in a few presentations was the importance of having a well-designed content structure in your repository. It allows you to enjoy the following benefits:

• your queries are faster or even you do not need them at all, which was shown by Marcel in his presentation,
• your repository does not get large,
• you will not have to use any unsafe administrator resource resolver (a great talk by Angela),
• the paths look more natural,
• etc.

In his presentation Alexander talked about other benefits and presented David’s model—a set of 7 rules which can be of great help in designing the proper content hierarchy.

3. Real-life stories

The guys from pro!vision demonstrated a few interesting use-cases: they have created a new, mobile-enabled Volkswagen site and redesigned their own page. The mobile version of Volkswagen took much UI-effort and the presentation showed a lot of interesting tools and technologies. We have already known Modernizr (I think we have even blog post about it), but the Apache Weinre project is definitely worth your while. It enables the developer to use desktop-browser debugging tools (like Chrome inspect) with mobile devices in real time. The responsive design of the pro!vision new site was the subject of the two lightning talks: Adaptive Images and Responsive Website. They provided plenty of knowledge about designing an accessible site.

4. Technical details

adaptTo() is a technical meeting so it was a golden opportunity to learn something new. Marcel’s talk about clustering was a very comprehensive one, explaining every detail of CRX built-in clustering features. There was also (already mentioned) the presentation on the CRX repository, internal data storage mechanisms, query performance and so forth. The presentation contained a lot of useful details and I would really recommend glancing at it.
People really interested in the future of Jackrabbit had a great opportunity to spend the whole day with Oak during the Oakathon event. We have got familiar with its new repository architecture, had a lot of time to discuss it and we have even written our own Oak plugin. After that (during Oakathon and the adaptTo) Tomasso showed us how simple it was to integrate Oak with an external indexing service—Solr in his case.

5. Basic concepts explained

The first two presentations explained basic concepts of JCR and Sling. The presentations were very comprehensive and I think they were of a great educational value. Especially new CQ developers should definitely get familiar with them, as both JCR and Sling ideas may look quiet strange to the people with the experience in RDBMS and traditional MVC web frameworks.

Conclusion

I think that the adaptTo() 2012 conference was a big success. We have acquired much specialist, technical knowledge and had the perfect opportunity to exchange our experience with the Sling community across Europe. We are looking forward to adaptTo() 2013.

In the massive amount of information available on the Internet it is getting more and more difficult to find relevant and valuable content and categorize it in one way or another. No doubt tagging this overwhelming amount of data is becoming more and more crucial from the SEO and digital marketing point of view as it plays important role in site positioning and allows end users a keyword search. Problems appear when editors are not scrupulous enough to add tags for new pages, press releases, blogs and tweets and to update them when content significantly changes. The worst case scenario is when there is a CMS filled with a whole bunch of untagged content. Then it may take too much time and resources to catch up with tagging. OpenCalais turns out to be a great solutions to such problems and what is more it allows for auto-tagging and can be easily integrated with other services.

About OpenCalais

OpenCalais (www.opencalais.com) was started as a metadata generation service allowing to incorporate semantic functionalities within Internet services. The OpenCalais web service analyzes submitted text and generates rich semantic metadata, part of which are entities that can be used for content tagging.
OpenCalais uses many techniques to generate these metadata including natural language processing and machine learning. The toolkit can find entities like people, places, organizations, technical terms and many, many others.
What is important to note is that the OpenCalais web service is free for private and commercial use. It offers quotas for 50 000 transactions per day and 4 transactions per second which should be more than enough for most use cases. On the website we can also find the information that this quota is negotiable if there is a need.

Document viewer

To make you able to quickly get through what the service has to offer the OpenCalais team has created a very useful document viewer tool which is available on this page. It is good to see what kind of metadata can be extracted from a few lines of text. To check what it can do just go there, paste something and see generated results with social tags, entities, events and facts.

Obtaining keys

To use the OpenCalais web service (and to make our integration package work) the user needs to register and request a free API key. To get the key you should visit this page.

OpenCalais integration

At Cognifide we thought it would a very tempting idea to integrate the OpenCalais service with the Adobe WEM platform and share it with the community to make automatic tagging easy and straightforward for editors worldwide and make the first step into promoting the semantic web.
A fairly good way to integrate OpenCalais with CQ5 was to create a workflow step for content tagging that could be embedded into any workflow fired on some CQ event or by hand. The mentioned step pulls data internally from a page and calls the OpenCalais integration OSGi service.
Text data is collected from the fields of components lying on a page, then the integration service sends concatenated text to a web service and pulls tags back. Finally the workflow step adds nonexistent tags into the CQ tag manager “Calais” namespace and applies tagging to a page.

The diagram below shows data flow when the workflow containing the tagging step is fired.

Data flow within the CQ - OpenCalais integration package

Configuring the OpenCalais integration service

Once the integration package is installed it needs some configuration to work. The most important and in fact the only option required is to set the API key value. To do this you need to navigate to the host:port/system/console/configMgr and find “OpenCalais Integration” on the list and click the “Edit” button. Then fill in the “API Key” field with the key that was previously sent to you.
The next field that should be configured is “Content fields” (it contains information about the fields that will be sent to OpenCalais for analysis). Entries in this field have to be separated with a vertical line “|” (eg. “text | jcr:title”). Setting the API key and content field is enough for us to make tagging work but there are still two more options to consider (both not required): “Allow distribution” and “Allow search”. The former indicates whether the extracted metadata can be distributed by OpenCalais. The latter indicates whether future searches can be performed on the extracted metadata by OpenCalais.

OpenCalais tagging workflow

In the installation package we deliver not only a workflow step for tagging but also an example workflow containing only our new step that allows to start without creating one’s own workflow.
The fastest way to get started is to navigate to some page on an author instance and run the OpenCalais tagging workflow. You can also configure workflow launcher to trigger auto-tagging on every page update.
If it was set up properly new tags should be added to “Calais” tags like in the picture below where we have run it on the Discover Geometrixx page.

List of generated tags

Page also should be tagged with generated tags like in the picture below:

Tags generated for example page

Summary

In this post I have described the importance of content tagging, what OpenCalais is and how it may help to enable content auto-tagging and to catch up with the whole untagged content already existing on the web.
I have shown the solution for integrating OpenCalais with Adobe CQ5 that we have found at Cognifide and how it was implemented in a package that is available here and can be installed using package manager.
To explain how to use the integration package provided by Cognifide I have also provided a simple example of page auto tagging within the Geometrixx sample content that comes with the default CQ installation.

Last night a bunch of content strategists met up at the Adobe offices in London to discuss adaptive content.  A big thank you goes to Mike Quinn and Christie Fidura for hosting, organising and presenting at the event.

Adaptive content: What you need to know to create intelligent, flexible, format-free content

The idea of adaptive content is nothing new. The digital publishing community has been working with it for years. However, as more and more businesses rush to embrace the value inherent in the phrase ‘create once, publish everywhere’, the web content strategy discipline must get up to speed quickly with what adaptive content really means for us and for our clients.
My talk focused on the need to do more on the editorial side of the content management equation, content management is about content, people, process and technology, and not just CMS.

Cleve Gibbon:  Architectures for adaptive content

To make content intelligent so that it can be readily adapted requires greater upstream thinking and wider involvement from those responsible for planning, creating and managing content. In short, a unified content strategy. However, adaptive content also requires flexibility from the content architecture(s) delivering those unified content strategies. Last night, I presented the audience with a couple of content architectures for delivering adaptive content.