OFIS Notes from 22 May 2009

General Notes

• to be determined: whether to add profs who will never generate reports, such as retired faculty
• data checking has resulted in improvements in the import of data from GSO
  • no way to catch missing historical students currently
• cannot do historical import for all faculties now
  • data is not coming back
  • does not appear to be a "size of results" issue
• discussion of supervision dates
  • when an actual date is available, that will be used
  • otherwise, term boundaries will be used for completion, thesis submission, transfer, etc.
• the people involved in providing data feeds into OFIS may benefit from a summary report of data imported into the system
• professors are calling the Office of Research with questions about data now being imported into OFIS
• for IP disclosure, the default should be no sharing of information
  • it is likely that individuals will want to select specific items to be displayed, rather than an "all or nothing" button
  • this matches experience in CS with occasional requests to modify data published on the CS web site
• discussion stemming from Marlon's meeting with the International Office resulted in a long discussion of keywords
  • NSERC 100 form keywords may be limiting
  • related keywords and best match are desirable
  • while we can brainstorm search scenarios, in the end we need to know what the people who would like to search want to accomplish
  • for consideration: move tables from InnoDB to an engine with both referential integrity and full text search capability
  • third party software in support of searching was mentioned: Sphinx, Lucene
  • one possible option is to have a nightly build of one or more keyword tables, against which searches can be run

- DawnKeenan - 25 May 2009