I want you all to understand that I appreciate your hard work and commitment to the VTIE project.I know you all worked very hard, especially over the weekend. Your talent and energy are wonderful resources on which I place very high value. Thanks so much for your effort.

 

The venue provided limited opportunity for showing off, but when we did demonstrate what we have, it gave us the opportunity to see where the strengths and weaknesses lie.

 

Listed below are issues that surfaced during the NSDL demo and subsequent meeting. While the NDSL demo environment was less than ideal, the upcoming HICSS presentation is one-half hour in front of an attentive audience. The items below should be addressed in time for the HICSS presentation. I’d like to see a demo on or before December 18.

 

I look forward to discussing these items during our teleconference next week.  Again, thanks for a job well done.

-Susan

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Portal

1. Portal (and all subsequent tools) needs to retain look and feel of VTIE homepage.
2. Need public access to all tools, but have Print (PDF) only instead of Submit.
3. Students and teachers need to be able to retrieve (PDF) papers and proposals from Portal (user’s MyVTIE). Also, “public” user should be able to retrieve PDF, but with no user name (for privacy purposes).
4. “Make Observation” needs to give the option of CCD Soft UID & passwd, or to use Bart’s agent to go to Skyview archive.
5. 4 panel design?
6. Need to implement Glossary Tool, such that from within the Portal, a student can click on a link <pre-defined for HICSS, but a search tool for March> and bring in a document that has been glossarized.
7. <for post-HICSS, i.e. for March> Need the ability to put students into groups to do group proposals and papers.

1. The “proposal” screen needs to be broken out into at least two screens. The first screen should be about “physical properties” such as color, spectral type, rotation period. These properties are inferred from measurements.  The second screen is about measurable quantities: the three we can do are angular size, amount of light incident on the chip in a given period of time (flux, but “brightness” in the vernacular), and morphology (shape). It may be that the “measurables” screen is not interactive – we need to discuss this. This is the “scaffolding” issue. <Dan will work with Karol on this.>
2. Icons. Especially useful for younger users, but the international aspect does not elude us. We need to develop and deploy little, monochrome icons for: galaxies, stars, asteroids, and planets. (comets, nebulae and star clusters to come later). These should appear in the drop down lists along with the text (I’ll bet a nickel that is a challenge). It may turn out, for a number of reasons, that we should ask them first what object type they plan to study. 
3. The “Justification” section needs to be guided (i.e. not entirely free-form). <Susan will work with Karol on this.>
4. Final page needs a “Print in PDF” button as a choice.
5. “Public” user can write a proposal, but final page has Print only (no Submit).
6. Need an agent to go out and find RA & Dec for asteroids and planets, for a given date and time.

1. Aperture choices: existing choices should be removed. Our cooperating telescope apertures should replace them. (LTO, Mt Wilson 14”, Mt Wilson 24”). <Melissa should provide the information on these apertures to Peyush.> Question: what is the default frame size that is served to the user?
2. Any non-functional options should be removed.
3. Image of source should be sent back to proposal generation interface. Note: in the case of the asteroids, the asteroid will not be visible in the image, so the image serves as a finder chart.
4. The current grid spacing does not add much value; it would help if it were slightly finer.

1. The “interpretation” box is redundant with “conclusions” (prefer conclusions).
2. Image caption text boxes should be somewhat longer (say 100 characters).
3. Input keywords boxes were missing.
4. “Public” user can write a paper, but final page has Print only (no Submit).
5. Need to be able to upload FITS images from user’s local disk (or URL). This probably requires a FITS -> PNG (or JPG, or whatever) converter. Karol told me Vishal has access to one....