Roundware Terminology

These are the basic conceptual building blocks of Roundware.

Project

The highest level of segmentation/grouping for all RW data. One RW instance can run many projects simultaneously, governed by CPU, bandwidth and memory resources.

Session

A client server connection established when the client is started and terminated when the client app is closed. session_id is established by the server and is used to keep track of multiple simultaneous sessions.

Asset

An individual piece of media contributed by a user. Roundware currently handles audio, photo and text assets and will soon handle video assets as well.

Envelope

A collection of assets and tags submitted by a user/participant. Envelopes can contain multiple assets (several audio recordings, audio and photo, etc) collected at the same time by the same user.

Tag

Metadata used to describe assets. Tags are arranged by tag category. For example, the tags within the 'gender' tag category could be 'male' and 'female'. Tags are very flexible and allow for collecting many different types of metadata to be used for filtering the assets at a later time.

Speaker

A geo-located object that broadcasts continuous audio over a certain area determined and attenuated logarithmically by radius.

Audiotrack

A linear assemblage of audio assets and silence (‘dead air’) which dynamically forms part of each stream by incorporating audio assets into the stream. There can be multiple audiotracks for each project which determine how many simultaneous audio assets can ever occur.

Stream

A unique session-based audio stream generated by RW based on the evolving filters supplied by a particular client; streams consist of a summation of speaker audio and asset audio (per the audiotracks)

Operation

A variable in API calls which determines what the server is supposed to do with the supplied variables (ie. getconfig, requeststream, modifystream, logevent etc)

Event

A record of each time a client pings the server with an API call. All events are tagged with an eventtype such as startsession, startlisten, uploadrecording, etc. Event data provides the core source for all RW system analysis.

Future: Zone

A geographic region defined by radius (meters) and center point (latitude, longitude) or by a polygon (list of lat/lon of vertices, in order). Different elements can be assigned to zones such as speakers, envelopes, assets, question tags, other tags etc. Once we incorporate geo-django and migrate to a database that handles GIS data more elegantly, zones will be easier to implement.