An Event Management Platform

Pedro Ferreira & Adrian Mönnich (for the Indico Team)

• Event Management System
• Developed at CERN
• Collaborative effort - Open Source
• > 70 developers over the years
• > 150 servers world wide

History

• 1999 - CDS Agenda
• 2002 - EU Project
• 2004 - First Conference
• 2007 - Room Booking
• 2009 - Video Conferencing
• 2013 - First Workshop
• 2015 - UNOG starts using it
• 2017 - Indico 2.0 (rewrite)
• 2019 - Modern ES and React

(Some of the) Data we store

• Event title, location, organizers, participants, timetable (talks)…
• Abstract/Talk submitters, speakers, authors, reviewing data…
• Lots of attached files;
• User names, e-mails, affiliations…
• Participant registration data (can be anything);
• and so on…

Metadata

• JSON-based REST API
• OpenGraph for Thumbnails
• Basic schema.org ontologies (JSON-LD + Microdata)

Events

{
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type": "Event",
    "name": "CERN-Solid brainstorming meeting",
    "startDate": "2020-02-07T10:00:00+01:00",
    "endDate": "2020-02-07T16:55:00+01:00",
    "description": "The aim of this first brainstorming meeting is to exchange technical information …",
    "location": {
        "@type": "Place",
        "address": "No address set",
        "name": "CERN"
    },
    "performer": [
        {
            "@type": "Person",
            "affiliation": {
                "@type": "Organization",
                "name": "CERN"
            },
            "name": "Maria Dimou"
        }
    ],
    "url": "https://indico.cern.ch/event/866085/"
}

Breadcrumbs

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Challenges

• Quality of data;
  • e.g. affiliations, multiple accounts…
• Classification and discoverability of events;
• Linking data across instances;
• Integration with authoring tools;
• Preservation of linked materials;
• Data privacy laws;

getindico.io

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