[open-science-dev] PyBOSSA: re-implementing the open source PHP BOSSA framework in Python

[Rufus Pollock]

On Friday, 25 November 2011, Daniel Lombraña González wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> During a hackfest in Cape Town (Africa at Home), and thanks to the collaboration of Rufus Pollock from Okfn, we have started to port and improve BOSSA (a volunteer thinking framework) to Python. You can find the code here: https://github.com/citizen-cyberscience-centre/pybossa

Right now we have an operational core. Immediate next step is to
create a demo app. Suggestion is to do  basic image classification
writing the task frontend in javascript + html (in a way that others
can copy and paste) and to scrape photos from flickr commons. See this
issue: <https://github.com/citizen-cyberscience-centre/pybossa/issues/10>

@Daniel: I believe you have already started on this (in collaboration
with gentleman from EpiCollect). How far have we come?

We'd also like to sign up some projects to try out the new platform so
if you've got a project please let us know and we can work to get this
running on PyBossa.

(@Lucas: I was thinking of porting the DataDigitizer work -- would you
and colleages be interested in working on this / porting what you've
been working on?)

> BOSSA is a framework that allows the creation of projects where the humans are the CPUs. Imagine a project where an algorithm has to answer the following question: does this photograph contain a dog? While for algorithms, usually, this will be very complicated for humans is a fairly simple task. BOSSA helps in the creation of this kind of projects, providing tools for managing users, jobs, etc.

The summary we have in the PyBossa README at the moment is:

<quote>
PyBossa is an open source platform for crowd-sourcing online
(volunteer) assistance to perform tasks that require human cognition,
knowledge or intelligence (e.g. image classification, transcription,
information location etc).

PyBossa was inspired by the BOSSA_ crowdsourcing engine but is written
in python (hence the name!). It can be used for any distributed tasks
application but was initially developed to help scientists and other
researchers crowd-source human problem-solving skills!
.. _BOSSA: http://bossa.berkeley.edu/
</quote>

I think we should do blog post on this asap to let the wider community
know what is going on.

>
> During the Africa at Home hackfest, we were in contact with the main developer of BOSSA and agreed on porting the code to Python.

Can we invite him to this list :-)

>
> This new implementation will allow running a central service, decoupling the task interface from BOSSA. This will allow the creation of different projects based on any programming language as the core system will provide a nice API to request and submit jobs using JSON. BOSSA will take care of distributing the tasks among its users.

We're directly porting the BOSSA sql structure and domain model.
However, we're making this available via a RESTful JSON web API which
should be easier to connect to than in current BOSSA setup where you
have to have your frontend run on BOSSA platform and use PHP function
calls.

Top priority here is to document the API so frontend devs can write against it.

Rufus