gonito/README.md
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Gonito platform
===============
[Gonito](https://gonito.net) (pronounced _ɡɔ̃ˈɲitɔ_) is a Kaggle-like
platform for machine learning competitions (disclaimer: Gonito is
neither affiliated with nor endorsed by [Kaggle](https://www.kaggle.com)).
What's so special about Gonito:
* free & open-source (GPL), you can use it your own, in your
company, at your university, etc.
* git-based (challenges and solutions are submitted only with git).
See the home page (and an instance of Gonito) at https://gonito.net .
Installation
------------
[Gonito](https://gonito.net) is written in [Haskell](https://www.haskell.org) and uses
[Yesod Web Framework](http://www.yesodweb.com/), but all you need is
just [the Stack tool](https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack). See https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack
for instruction how to install Stack on your computer.
By default, Gonito uses [Postgresql](http://www.postgresql.org/), so it needs to be installed and running at your computer.
After installing Stack:
createdb -E utf8 gonito
git clone git://gonito.net/geval
git clone git://gonito.net/gonito
cd gonito
stack setup
# before starting the build you might need some non-Haskell dependencies, e.g. in Ubuntu:
# sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev liblzma-dev libpcre3-dev libcairo-dev libfcgi-dev
stack build
stack exec yesod devel
The last command will start the Web server with Gonito (go to
http://127.0.0.1:3000 in your browser).
Gonito & git
------------
Gonito uses git in an inherent manner:
* challenges (data sets) are provided as git repositories,
* submissions are uploaded via git repositories, they are referred to with
git commit hashes.
Advantages:
* great flexibility as far as where you want to keep your challenges
and submissions (could be external, well-known services such as
GitHub or GitLab, your local git server, let's say gitolite or Gogs, or
just a disk accessible in a Gonito instance),
* even if Gonito ceases to exist, the challenges and submissions are still available
in a standard manner, provided that git repositories (be it external or local) are
accessible,
* data sets can be easily downloaded using the command line
(e.g. `git clone git://gonito.net/paranormal-or-skeptic`), without
even clicking anything in the Web browser,
* facilitates experiment repeatability and reproducibility (at worst
the system output is easily available via git)
* tools that were used to generate the output could be linked as git subrepositories
* some challenge/submission metadata are tracked in a Gonito-independent way
(within git commits),
* copying data can be avoided with git mechanisms (e.g. when the challenge is already
cloned, downloading specific submissions should be much quicker),
* large data sets and models could be stored if needed using mechanisms such as git-annex (see below).
### Commit structure
The following flow of git commits is recommended (though not required):
* the challenge without hidden data for main test sets (i.e. files such as `test-A/expected.tsv`)
should be pushed to the `master` branch
* the hidden files (`test-A/expected.tsv`) should be added in a
subsequent commit and pushed either to the `dont-peek` branch or a
`master` branch of a separate repository (if access to the hidden
data must be more strict),
* the submissions should be committed with the `master` branch as the
parent (or at least ancestor) commit and pushed to the same
repository as the challenge data (in some user-specific branch) or any other
repository (could be user-owned repositories)
* any subsequent submissions could be derived in a natural way from other git commits
(e.g. when a submission is improved, or even two approaches are merged)
* new versions of the challenge can be committed (a challenge can be updated at Gonito)
to the `master` (and `dont-peek`) branches
See also the following picture:
![Recommended commit structure](misc/commits.png)
### git-annex
In some cases, you don't want to store challenge/submissions files simply in git:
* very large data files, textual files (e.g. `train/in.tsv` even if
compressed as `train/in.tsv.xz`)
* binary training/testing data (PDF files, images, movies, recordings)
* data sensitive due to privacy/security concerns (a scenario where it's OK to store
metadata and some files in a widely accessible repository, but some files require
limited access)
* large ML models (note that Gonito does not require models for evaluation, but still
it might be a good practice to commit them along with output files and scripts)
Such cases can be handled in a natural manner using git-annex, a git
extension for handling files and their metadata without commiting
their content to the repository. The contents can be stored at a wide
range of [special
remotes](https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/), e.g. S3
buckets, WebDAV, rsync servers.
It's up to you which files are stored in git in a regular manner and
which are added with `git annex add`, but note that if a
challenge/submission file must be stored via git-annex and are required
for evaluation (e.g. `expected.tsv` files for the challenge or
`out.tsv` files for submissions), the git-annex special remote must be
given when a challenge is created or a submission is done and the
Gonito server must have access to such a special remote.
Authors
-------
* Filip Graliński
References
----------
@inproceedings{gralinski:2016:gonito,
title="{Gonito.net - Open Platform for Research Competition, Cooperation and Reproducibility}",
author={Grali{\'n}ski, Filip and Jaworski, Rafa{\l} and Borchmann, {\L}ukasz and Wierzcho{\'n}, Piotr},
booktitle="{Branco, Ant{\'o}nio and Nicoletta Calzolari and Khalid Choukri (eds.), Proceedings of the 4REAL Workshop: Workshop on Research Results Reproducibility and Resources Citation in Science and Technology of Language}",
pages={13--20},
year=2016,
url="http://4real.di.fc.ul.pt/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4REALWorkshopProceedings.pdf"
}