The LAPPS Grid is an open source project that relies on the community that supports it. There are numerous ways for people to get involved with the LAPPS Grid.
Mailing Lists
When users have a question or a topic to discuss, they can post it to the LAPPS Grid Mailing List, where the whole community can respond. You can contribute by posting your questions, solutions, and experience.
Contribute Services
There are thousands of useful NLP tools in existence and the LAPPS Grid Main server (and the LAPPS Grid Team) cannot support all of them. Any tool can be wrapped as a web service which can then be called from the LAPPS Grid. We have developed a tutorial on wrapping services for the LAPPS Grid.
Create Interoperability Definitions
We have created the LAPPS Grid Web Service Exchange Vocabulary (WSEV) to provide a way for web services to communicate about the linguistic information they consume and produce. We welcome extensions to the WSEV to handle phenomena that are currently not covered.
Share LAPPS Grid Objects
You can help other users by sharing or publishing your LAPPS/Galaxy histories, workflows, and datasets with other users. This allows others to examine your analysis in detail (histories), reuse your analysis with their own input data (workflows), and use your results in their own analysis (datasets). You can also document your analysis using Galaxy Pages in order to provide others with a written explanation of your analysis. See The Galaxy wiki for more information.
House services on your server
The LAPPS Grid can call services that are suitably wrapped on servers located anywhere in the world. These servers can be made available to other researchers who use the LAPPS Grid (or any federated grid in the Open Language Grid). This provides a way to distribute resource consumption around the community, since services are run on the machine where they live. Contact the LAPPS team for more information.
It is sometimes useful for users with applications that are not suitable for network use (e.g., due to issues of licensing or privacy concerns) to keep their services and/or data on a local server where only organization members can access them.
Documentation
The wiki contains a large amount of documentation about using the LAPPS Grid. You can help keep the documentation current and relevant by maintaining it and addressing gaps. See Wiki Help for more on updating the wiki.
Help develop the LAPPS Grid
The LAPPS Grid is an open source project, and anyone can contribute to the code, which is housed on github. We also maintain a developer mailing list. See For Developers for more information.
Events
The LAPPS Grid project has a presence at many events throughout the year, including workshops, tutorials, and talks at meetings, conferences, and courses. See Events for a complete list and a link to Google Calendar.
Outreach
You can also help by spreading the word about the LAPPS Grid. There are numerous ways to do this.