Nikita 0.7 released

[Thomas Sødring]

Folks,

We are pleased to announce the release of nikita-noark5-core 0.7.

This is again an incremental release and sees some nice new 
functionality. Elasticsearch became a dependency in the project and we 
now parse all incoming documents for text and index the contents. We 
also do text analysis of images.

There have been a lot of minor improvements to the codebase and the 
domain model as well improvements to OData support. 4 contributors have 
contributed to the codebase, something that is a record in the project.

Maybe one of the bigger functionality improvements in this release is 
the ability to support multiple organisations in one nikita instance. 
This is a requirement from teaching at OsloMet as each student is given 
their own organisation  to maintain records for. I am very happy with 
the way we managed to use nikita for teaching purposes at OsloMet this 
semester. We were able to get a pipeline showing the processing of a 
case from  "Records Manager" -> "Case handler" -> "Leader" -> "Records 
Manager". We did however see problems sending mail from Microsoft to our 
protonmail account that we used. Not all mails seemed to go through.

Most of my efforts this semester went into developing a new user 
interface for nikita. The old angular 1.x approach had to be replaced as 
angular 1.x is EOL. I chose ReactJS and semantic-ui as the basis for 
this work and I am happy with the result. There is still a lot of work 
left though. semantic-ui is for all intents and purposes dead so I need 
to replace semantic-ui with fomantic-ui.

Unfortunately, OsloMet no longer allows us to have our servers available 
to the wider world so currently we do not have an instance that I can 
point you to to test nikita out. I hope to have a solution in place 
before the summer.

Going forward. I was hoping to apply for official Noark 5 certification 
before the summer holidays, but that's in about 10 weeks so I am afraid 
we might not meet that deadline. I will be presenting an alternative 
approach to the Noark API called greqAPI in two weeks at the DLM forum 
meeting in Oslo.

I have developed a python tool to import some basic data into nikita. 
This is likely to be useful to others to show simple interaction with 
nikita. I also developed a mail bridge to a proton email account that 
automatically retrieves emails from the protonmail account and imports 
them to nikita. The tool works but lacks robustness. I expect both of 
these to either make their way into the nikita codebase or be linked 
projects. I would like to introduce fido 
(https://github.com/openpreserve/fido) as a dependency in the project. 
Fido can detect pronom codes for digital objects (documents) and would 
be a nice feature to have in nikita on document upload.

nikita has slowed down over the last year. I think this is likely a 
result of us approaching a 1.0 version and the wish to send in an 
application for approval as an official  Noark 5 system. However, the 
API standard is still lacking so there is a gap between the API standard 
and the Noark standard that leaves us a little in limbo. Limbo can be 
hard to overcome! I think the time has come to move forward with a 
application for approval!

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this release!

  - Tom