Week 9
From W
global links:
- Reports - weekly reports. setup and test reports, and others
- Meetings - information on past and future meetings
- Project plan - the original, and current updates
- Web services links
- The admin system was completed this week and moved to user testing. Wendy will reply next week (week 10) with any problems. Functionality to include suggestions for input fields has worked smoothly, though the function tables still require data to be pulled from Gene Ontology. This should be finished by next week.
- Marco is looking over the web services and will reply in due course with further suggestions.
- Derek Richard, who recently requested data from the NPD, replied to my questions which gives some further user feedback for the dissertation. He would also be willing to try some new services if I can make something suitable for him. I will see how time goes. But his comments are useful either way.
- Graeme had some interesting news from a BioMart lecture he went to - they are trying to offer a federated query over databases supported at different institutions, but are stuck resolving the queries to more than 2 databases. This sounds like an ideal sort of thing for ogsa-dai, so will go in the dissertation as a possible use of ogsa-dai. Although their aim seems to be more aimed at users, giving them a way to make their data easily available to some sort of BioMart harvester, it may still be relevant. Particularly depending on how easy it is for users to do that anyway - if they require technical support anyway, implementing an ogsa-dai controller on each database may be a valid option.
- If time is available, the original user system will be completely replaced. I have discovered that the only major part of it that cannot be easily done away with is the logic-handling functions of the online search e.g. AND, OR, NOT. So if I get time to write a new function for that, I can strip out the content, which needs updating anyway, and re-wrap it all within the new system. This would also provide the chance to expose the data about each record in a REST framework.
- However, there is a lot of work still to be done on the writing of the dissertation, so I will be concentrating on that next week, and just dealing with coding as I receive replies from Wendy or Marco. I will return to coding and any big fixing in week 11.
