Indico’s Glossary

Absolutely Public

The state in which a resource is public, regardless of the status that is inherited from the parent resource.

Abstract

Ideas or summary of a presentation/contribution, often assigned to a track. Once accepted becomes a contribution.

Account

A register, associated with a user, and that enables him/her to authenticate his/her identity. Indico supports local accounts (no longer used at CERN) and NICE accounts (centrally registered at CERN, and authenticated through SSO).

Avatar

An “Avatar” is a representation of a user in the Indico database. It usually contains all the user’s personal info (that is extracted from the NICE database the first time the user logs into Indico). These data can be explicitly modified by the user. An Avatar is normally associated with one or more accounts.

Break

A pause in the schedule of a meeting/conference. Breaks can be placed inside sessions/slots or at the top level.

Category

A container for events. Categories can contain either other categories (sub-categories), or events, never both at the same time. The category hierarchy of Indico resembles a tree where categories that contain events are the “leaves”.

Clone

Cloning a meeting means replicating it (with the exact same information) on a diferent date. This is normally useful for series of meetings whose participans and/or contents don’t change significantly.

Conference

The most complex kind of event, containing the same as a meeting, plus support for registration, abstract management, and other features that are specific to this kind of event.

Contribution

Usually a presentation taking place within a session or slot.

Evaluation

A poll, that is conducted normally after an event takes place, so that the organizer can gather feedback about it. It can be applied to any event, and the results can be exported as stylesheets.

Event

An event is either a Lecture, Meeting or Conference.

File

In the context of Indico, this is a resource that links to a physical file, contained in Indico’s “archive”. Files are stored inside materials.

Lecture

A presentation, normally done by one or more speakers. It doesn’t contain any “substructures” such as contributions.

Link

In the context of Indico, a Link is a resource that links to some other resource on the Web, specified by a URL. Links exist inside materials.

Material

A Material is a container for Files and Links, it groups resources of the same nature (i.e. slides, documents, drawings...). Materials can be attached to Categories (quite rare), Events, Sessions, Contributions and Subcontributions.

Meeting

A kind of event that implies some degree of participation from different participants, over different topics (Contributions). Contributions can be placed into Sessions, for better organization. Slots can also be used, but they are disabled by default.

Minutes

Minutes are annotations produced by participans in a meeting. They can be associated with Meetings, Sessions, Contributions and Subcontributions.

Private

A status in which a resource cannot be accessed by users that do not accomplish certain criteria (i.e. being in a list, or coming from a specific IP domain...).

Private by Inheritance

A status in which an resource is private just because its parent resource was set as private (either by inheritance, or explicitly).

Public

A status in which a resource is publicly accessible, with no constraints. This status can be overriden, if the parent resource is set as private (see Private by Inheritance).

Resource

In the context of this document, a Resource is a category, event (lecture, meeting or conference), session, contribution, subcontribution, material, link or file. It is basically any information-bearing object in Indico’s domain.

Session

A time slot to help organise your conference timetable. Can contain slots, contributions and breaks.

Slot

A session can be split into slots, can be used when the session happens over more than one period of time. Can contain contributions and breaks.

Subcontribution

A subdivision of a contribution.

Track

Tracks define the main divisions/topics of your conference. You can attach contributions and abstracts to tracks.

Visibility

In the context of Indico, Visibility usually refers to the extent to which an event can be seen in the event overview page. This attribute sets whether the event can be seen as belonging to the top level class (and all those below), to none of them (invisible), or to one of the intermediate classes (and all those below).