Notes from OpenKey meeting—2/14/2003

2:00-4:30    Manning 304

Members present: Steve Seiberling, Peter White, Evelyn Daniel, Jane Greenberg, Sarah Reuning

 

  1. Specimen record creation
    1. Update w/XML and specimen record creation—Steve and David have run some data through the Turbo XML program and created test records, but have not created any real records.

 

Action Item: Steve and David will create 5 XML records to show to Bryan during the meeting on 02/23/2003

 

    1. Communication w/Urbana —For numerical character states that are ranges, Bryan and Steve agree the have four states: usual minimum and maximum and absolute minimum and maximum.  If the character can be only one size, use that number for both usual and absolute values

 

UIUC sent the UNC team 80 new characters that cover grasses and sunflowers. However, some of the new characters appear to be in a different form than the UNC form, while some seem to be repetitions of characters that UNC already has.

 

No Action item: The team decided to wait until Bryan’s Feb 23rd visit to address the issues with the new characters

 

Bryan and Steve have different opinions about how to deal with inapplicable vs. unknown characters. Bryan favors not coding for inapplicable character, whereas, Steve insists ignoring inapplicable characters will result in nonsensical results.

 

Action Item: Steve will draft an email response to Bryan, outlining why OpenKey should encode rather than ignore character states that are inapplicable. He will forward the email draft to the other UNC team members for comment before sending to Bryan.

 

    1. Are we on schedule with deadlines set at last meeting: NO, the schedule below has been delayed by the possible inclusion of new characters from UIUC.

·         Terminology list — By 1/31/03 (the list will be in usable form to move ahead)

·          Assigning characters to tree list — Begin 2/10/03 (Alan and Steve will work together to assign characters to the first 5 trees on paper. Note: Proof reading of all paper forms will be time consuming.)

·         David's work on revising forms according to new DTDs/schemas —By 2/10/03 (Revised forms will be ready for testing.  Steve and David have been meeting to discuss form revisions. David is also creating an Access database that will house the information from the turbo forms for the use of the OpenKey team. David may create the interface for the database as well.)

·         Begin data input into turbo forms — On 2/17/03  (The electronic forms will follow the paper forms. First five paper forms will be ready for data entry into electronic forms)

 

 

  1. PIC database issues
    1. Migration from Kiwi to Owl—Sarah is in the process of changing all references from Kiwi to Owl in the source code of the PIC Web Site. This process should be completed in about three days.  Currently, the database search works on only 30% of the pages.

Action Item: Sarah will finish changing Kiwi references

 

    1. Making images available that have been uploaded to ibiblio, but not entered into the Botnet database— This task should only take a few days and can be completed by a student already employed by the Biology department.

 

Action Item: Peter will find a workstudy student to do this job. Steve will train the student.

 

    1. Additional issues? Jane and Evelyn want to hire a Database student to document and maintain the PIC database. The specifics of this plan will be discussed at a later date. SMET is the priority now. Steve still needs access to the copy of the database that resides on Owl so that he can FTP his changes to this location as he updates the database. He also needs an ibiblio account so that he can FTP a copy to ibiblio to function as a backup copy.

 

Action Item: Sarah will look into getting Steve an account on Owl

Action Item: Steve will look into getting himself an ibiblio account

  1. SMET
    1. Demonstration of current botany collections at The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) (http://nsdl.org)— Sarah showed examples of current collections. The team suggested getting PIC registered with the library

Action Item: Sarah will look into registering PIC with the NSDL

    1. Targeted research/strengths of previous grants— Jane suggested writing a grant based on PIC that would involve testing an education tool and focus on 6th graders.  The project already has ties to McDougal Middle School, as well as other middle schools, such as Jane’s sister’s school in Arizona.  Peter suggested coming up with a way to test the effectiveness of using virtual loans to keep from having damaged or lost specimens and to increase the circulation of specimens. Additionally, Peter is interested in coming up with a system for water marking images with the images’ URLs. Evelyn is interested in the linking of scientific and common terms, which could be written into Jane’s grant idea. 
    2. Open discussion/ Create deadlines and division of labor —Both Jane’s and Peter’s ideas are appealing; however, Jane would have to do too much in the way of literature review to write a grant in the area Peter suggests. Jane is eager to write a grant in her area of interest. Peter volunteered to investigate his ideas with the notion of using them in a different future grant proposal. Since coordination of efforts and communication has been complicated with OpenKey, the team agreed that the SMET grant application will be written without the collaboration of experts at other universities.

 

Action Item: Jane will come up with a concept paper and a list of relevant writings with in the next two weeks. Since she is working on this paper, she will not come to the meeting with Bryan on Sunday, but will be in Manning incase questions arise.