[tor-dev] globe compass integration

[Sathyanarayanan Gunasekaran]

Hey Christian,

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Christian <me at rndm.de> wrote:
> Hi,
> in the last couple of days I thought about a topic for a gsoc application.
>
> After getting ideas from Karsten and Sathya, I started making a rough
> roadmap of things that I want to do for globe, in the next couple of
> months (and maybe use it as a idea for a gsoc topic).
>
> - add new onionoo features to globe

Why? Do we want to deprecate onionoo?

> - add compass functionality + open compass tickets to globe
> - improve/add help documentation

These would be awesome!

>
> The central point would be to add compass functionality to globe.
> This has the advantage that the user can use the same application to
> search for relay/bridge details and do queries with grouped results.

Sounds good.

> This could be accomplished by changing the UI and modify advanced search
> filters, add options for grouping and grouped search results.
> Another suggestion was to add a group detail page that displays
> aggregated data for multiple details.
>
> Currently compass pulls all onionoo relay details and queries them locally.
> Karsten suggested that globe could use the same method and load the
> onionoo data every hour or so and do the currently supported search and
> compass functionality on it.
> The idea is that globe could store the dump in a db (e.g. mongodb) and
> use its features for searching, grouping and aggregating data.

Is this going to be part of globe-node? I don't think there is a need
to rewrite the Compass backend(the logic) -- it exposes a REST API
which can just be consumed by Globe. Majority of the open Compass
tickets are bugs in the frontend.

> This would be a major rewrite away from calling the Onionoo-API, to
> querying the locally available dump.

I don't think this is a good idea. There's no need to rewrite the
existing Globe code.

> I would like to know, if you think that integrating Compass into globe
> would be a good idea?

Yes.

> Do you think that the compass integration would be a reasonable project
> for the gsoc?

Yes. Bonus points if you can leverage the data provided by Compass for
some nice graphs like heat maps (based on probability) or something
like that.

> Do you have other ideas on how to improve globe?

1) Add the Compass frontend to Globe
2) Refactor the Compass UI -- I don't think the current compass UI is
intuitive enough and could be extended to display more information in
a nicer way.
3) Add visualizations and graphs based on Compass data

Thanks,
--Sathya