OFIS Notes from 18 Mar 2009

Met from 11am-12:15.

• Question from Peter D. on request by Arts, to use OFIS as well.
  • But Peter suggests we don't currently want to add new developers for every faculty.
  • Can someone such as Daniel produce their reports as well?
    • That's a totally open question. Two requirements for building Math Faculty integration are: an RTF template for the proper report, and the business-logic and any database changes necessary to produce it. The business logic for Math is entirely unknown, so far (eg., changes other than student evaluation questions).

• Daniel brought up Research Groups: they are in research book, but aren't covered in OFIS.
  • Do we need to represent them in OFIS? Do they have wider applicability beyond printing the CS Research Book?
    • Discussed treating them similarly to Publications, which have some group-like properties and simple structure.
    • UI: there could be a user-tab for profs to chose the group(s) they are associated with; with admin-only access to add new groups.
    • Report: could be added to web-page output.
    • Do we know if any other faculty uses groups? Should look into it.
    • Made decision to not make a db change now; will consider groups later.

• Discussion of Publications and co-authors: how handled editing joint publications data?

• (If we are looking for engineering profs who aren't fond of OFIS, possibly in ECE?)
• Discussion of Unicode support in publications data: uncertain status.
  • How does RTF support unicode?
  • think PHP and mysql support it well, don't know about RTF.

Question about bibliography import from CS: can bibtex be easily imported to OFIS?

• Daniel will look into bibtex output formats. csv?
• Daniel will ask Peter vanBeek about how we keep bibliographies in bibtex.

Later on Wednesday: Discussion between Daniel, Peter van Beek, and Bill Ince:

Exporting from bibtex:

• PvB says 90% profs keep their publications records in bibtech; each their own files.

Who should I ask about report formatting?

• Not Cher, she's not so involved with the book.
• Bill and PvB wrote the code for the book and electronic version; either might be good choices.

Bill suggests we should be working on something more elaborate than the book, which is a problem they've already solved; as a "smoke test" of what OFIS is capable of. He wonders what kinds of reports are difficult cases that OFIS has never handled.

• There are valid claims that the book will stretch OFIS well enough...

PvB asked me if the project could use a co-op student. I said I can let him know in a week. Could be for may or September terms.

Who is in charge of student evaluation data?

• Frank Tompa has excel spreadsheet, constantly changing data; PvB suggests he (PvB) would send it to me.
  • But not now, since data will change?
  • Frank Tompa is in charge of what data is collected and forms. I should ask him about data-flow from paper to xls; PvB suggests I talk to him.

Past tasks:

• Daniel met with Vu Huynh (CPH 4318) on Friday morning to tour the source-code.
  • Samba, auth by nexus. smb://ofis.uwaterloo.ca/ofis . <-- required manual mounting on his OSX 10.5. (ie, mount -t smbfs //drallen:[pw]@ofis.uwaterloo.ca/ofis ~/bin works (and the OFIS share appears in mounted drives). But couldn't get it to work from command-k network-share tool on 10.5, though was able to on spare 10.4 machine. But manual method works!

• /phpmyadmin access <-- need URL
• /git - though they aren't actively using source-control yet. <-- discussed; low-priority to the OFIS team.

• Daniel will investigate how simplest to obtain CS "date joined" data.
  • Dean's office? directly from the existing Research Directory profiles? CSCF/Bill? <-- looks like: existing data from Research Directory profiles, since it was manually merged.

• Daniel will investigate CS format for publication citations: is it a different format than Eng's? <-- yes.

Samples:

CS

W. Golab and R. Boutaba. Admission Control in Data Transfers Over Lightpaths. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) series on Optical Communications and Networking, 25(6):102-110, 2007.

ENG

S.M.N. Hassan, P.L. Douglas, E. Croiset, "Techno-Economic Study of CO2 Capture From an Existing Cement Plant Using MEA Scrubbing", International Journal of Green Energy, 4, 2007, 1 - 24 (Accepted in 2006)

• CS: uses what appears to be Chicago Manual of Style, Documentary-Note Style, Bibliographic Form (but also without quotes around title).
• Eng: appears to be Chicago Manual of Style, Documentary-Note Style, Citation Form (but without italicized journal title).
• http://www.libs.uga.edu/ref/chicago.html#docnote

Upcoming tasks:

• Daniel will look into bibtex output formats. csv?
• Daniel will ask Peter vanBeek about how we keep bibliographies in bibtex.
• Daniel will tell Peter whether we could use a co-op for the summer or fall.
• Daniel will ask Frank Tompa about student evaluation data-flow.