2011 Winter Project Week:MIDAS for data hosting

• 

  Projects List

Key Investigators

• Kitware: Zach Mullen
• UIowa: Hans Johnson

Objective

Make use of the MIDAS data archiving system to host data related to tests such as baseline and comparison images.

Motivation:

• Not all users will want to build and test every module of Slicer, so they shouldn't have to download the testing data for every part of Slicer
• Encourage the optional use of testing with "large" datasets that aren't downloaded unless the "large-data" tests are configured to run
• Don't download any duplicated test data more than once

Approach, Plan

• MIDAS+CTest: create a thin wrapper for "add_test" calls that will allow for adding a test that references remote data on a MIDAS server in a human-readable way
• The underlying mechanism will address data by its checksum to ensure integrity and no duplication of downloads, but test creators and users shouldn't have to deal with checksums
• Create an "Easy Upload" page for the Slicer community to allow test data to be uploaded and ready to test against with as few clicks as possible
• MIDASDesktop: A GUI application for moving data between a client machine and a MIDAS server

Progress

• MIDAS+CTest macro has been created and is currently in use successfully with the BRAINSTools test data.
• Easy Upload page has a working prototype and requires further improvements and customization for Slicer
• MIDASDesktop: svn repo is here [1]

Delivery Mechanism

• Test data will be hosted publicly (with any necessary access control) on [2]
• That site will also host the Easy Upload page.
• MIDASDesktop lives in the svn repository here: [3]