Commencing SBML4Humans: Getting Accepted into GSoC 2021 and the Road Ahead

There come some special days in a person's life which they remember lifelong. For me, one such day would be Monday, 17th May 2021, when I got accepted into Google Summer of Code 2021 under National Resource for Network Biology! It is a most extraordinary feeling to see the hardwork of the past few months finally paying off and to get accepted under such a wonderful organization.

I will now be officially working on the project "SBML4Humans - Interactive SBML Report for Humans" over the summer and will try to achieve the planned out milestones with full enthusiasm. The link to my project description can be found here. 

As a start to this journey, I had a video conference with my project mentor Dr. Matthias König last week. It felt really good to receive his best compliments on me getting accepted for GSoC and to listen to his motivational words.  

We had a good discussion on the road ahead in the project and chalked out some project milestones according to the proposal. For starters, we decided on how to refactor the existing sbmlutils codebase in order to make it compatible for the interactive report to be made in Vue.js. This included adding new attributes to the SBML objects as per the latest specification, unifying the attribute name styles and working on the JSON serialization of the SBML model information. This serialized JSON information will be used to pass information between the backend and frontend of the SBML4Humans web application and will be pivotal in proper functioning of the report. Below is a schematic representation of the web application overview and its functioning. 



We further discussed adding history to the SBML objects and on how we can add support for multiple models in the report based on the SBML comp package. These points were discussed as a precursor to the detailed work modules that will follow in the later part of the development process. I cleared many of the queries that I had over the refactoring process and Dr. König's explanation made them very easy for me to understand.

Over the next week, I would continue bonding even better with my mentors and the entire NRNB community. The week would also witness the initialization and setup of the project for the actual coding period. Looking forward to this joyride with the most vibrant of ideas and beams of enthusiasm.

Until next time!

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