Research log proposal
Martin Gustafsson
martin.gustafsson at chalmers.se
Sun May 20 17:32:50 UTC 2007
Hello everybody,
I would like to suggest a project that could be useful to a lot of
people, in a context that's a bit off from what web CMS:es usually are
for. I wasn't sure where to put a proposal like this, but since the
product is intended primarily for university employees, I figured this
is the most suitable of the Plone lists. If you think otherwise, please
let me know.
What I have in mind is a Plone-based system for keeping scientific
notes. As a scientist, you need to keep a detailed log of what you do,
of the data you collect and the pictures you take. Today, everybody does
this on paper, simply because there is no good digital solution. Paper
logbooks are hard to search, you must keep several in parallell or
remember to always take one with you if you work in several labs, and
you can't easily go back and comment or modify previous notes.
Additionally, almost all measurement data is taken by computers these
days and pictures are taken digitally. Having pictures, data and notes
all in one place, searchable and categorizable, would be tremendously
useful. I have told some colleagues about the idea of setting up a
web-based note taking system, and they've all been very interested. If
nicely executed, a system like this could be adopted pretty widely, and
I think Plone would be an excellent platform to do it.
The general characteristics of such a system would be:
1) Fast adding and editing of content. A lab journal is more for writing
than for reading, as opposed to an intranet or a regular website. The
number of clicks required should be minimized, and this area that might
require some special adjustments.
2) Views that show the full text of each note in a folder, filtered by
keywords and dates.
3) Pre-defined Marshalling so that files can be uploaded in batch and
notes/data files be appended programmatically.
4) Simple installation and most special features removed. No workflow,
events, news etc; everything set up for one-person use.
I have a pretty good idea of what this should look like, and nearly all
the important parts can be done in Plone. The problem is, I don't have
the skills to do it by myself without somebody more experienced helping
me out. How do you suggest that I turn this into a real project and get
others to join me and help out with the coding?
If anyone here is interested, I would be happy to post a more technical
proposal, describing how I think this should be implemented. And again,
if you know of a better place to post it than here, that would be highly
appreciated too.
Best regards
Martin Gustafsson
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