KIX may finally take off - or at least hover

The last two weeks I have been involved in many different activities related to Kix and KixFw:

• I have started a collaboration with an American, who would like to install and try out KIX. We will start by creating and refining an installation instruction at the KixFw website at SourceForge.
  
• I have presented KIX to a wider group of software developers at EFDA-JET.
  
• As a result a colleague suggested the DocReview plugin would be of benefit when reviewing new and existing JET Operating Instructions (machine safety critical instructions to the Engineer-in-Charge when operating the JET plant).
• Similarly, another colleague would like to use the DocReview plugin for his source code reviews. However, he would like the DocReview plugin to be configured with a syntax highlighter for the programming language he is using. This can be accommodated with a small enhancement.
• I have demonstrated KIX relatively comprehensively to another control engineer at JET. He would like to use KIX for collaborations around JET enhancement projects and major JET maintenance modifications. However, he would like to wait until KixFw handles unknown binary files gracefully i.e. Windows Office files and similar proprietary formats.
• I have used KIX to create a JET intranet website to manage the JET Spectrometer Room Project. Many pages are still missing in particular the pages which will hold formal representations of the detailed requirements for each of the 18 subprojects.
  

High precision feedback from stake-holders

When discussing kixfw with other professionals there is one feature of the kixfw collaboration tool which seems to attract more interest than anything else:

High precision feedback.

This strictly not a property of kixfw itself, but the mainly of the plugins which are used to view different types of documents. For example the DocReview plugin enables one threaded web conference per document line.



My experience with this detailed level of feedback is that the quality of the documents are raised dramatically. Review comments are firmly connected to the relevent context and kept for as long as the documents remains on-line. This provides excellent organisational memory.

The above screen shoot is an extract from the preparation of The Kix White Paper.

Much activity but no break through

Today I proposed KixFw as an internal collaboration tool to define the formal requirements for the interface software in the Spectrometer Room Project at EFDA-JET. The main idea is to define the various software requirements as formal documents expressed in CCL - the CODAS Configuration Language (a serialisation of RDF). A KIX plugin will be developed such that the software requirements can be viewed as hierarchical tables. The tables will have numerous HTML links, which will allow detailed threaded web conferences on any interface specification issue.

The same requirements documents can also be used to automatically generate software interface implementations following the principles of MDA (Model Driven Architecture).

As a similar example I demonstrated the operation of the KIX document review plugin and got positive feedback from the meeting. Someone suggested this should be announced to a wider audience.

Last Wednesday during a startup investment meeting I discussed the role of KIX in document reviews for the Semantic Web. In the semantic web context there is a pressing need to develop many different domain vocabolaries. This is an ideal application for KIX.