OFIS Notes from 4 November, 2009

Past Tasks

• Tamir: ct'd bibtex
• Daniel: research book

HR Feed and Marlon's email thread with HR/IST

• terminations are tricky in ofis; asking HR for clarifications.
• HR says users should validate their MyHRInfo before reporting errors. Would be great if MyHRInfo had more data exposed.
• Sabbatical information is coming soon from the HR feed. Unknown exactly when.

Desire to have common formats for input screens; listing data sources and "if you find an error..." providing the most sensible link(s).

• HR Contacts: different contacts for MyHRInfo problems vs. their own data.
• We don't have direct email contacts for WatIAM, GSO, Ofc of Research. Beth will investigate.
• Employee IDs changing in HR data -> tricky logic. Marlon says ~100s records with more than one employee ID for faculty/staff. dealing with it.
• WatIAM sources data from 3 dbs; Ray says multiple records from: student services, HR, telephone services (necessary for room numbers).
  • WatIAM excludes colleges.
  • Marlon is thinking of example users to look up re: cross-listings that might be problematic.
• Middle Names in data: HR doesn't have as good data as GSO. Bleh.
• Filtering out sessionals, visiting profs: fine.
• Marlon says: missing WatIAM IDs; do we not include? assume they're colleges only?

Data to record on webpage:

• Daniel got agreement in principle for additions to webpage output; "just simple field additions."

Discussion of interface for webpage output

• we could/should eventually pre-validate webpage (and other) output: "You're missing research interests."
  • How does user know what they need to fill in, and where?
  • Suggestion: two complementary approaches: put description on input where it's used; and supply a "this info is missing" warning on output page. Possibly with a data map.

Some info could be optional for CVs. Do we just assume yes? Do we supply a "CV" field as well as "webpage"?

Discussion of a checklist of where data comes from / where it goes.

• Daniel shared URL for https://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/twiki/view/CF/OfisCSOutputRequirements
• Daniel will spec out a proposal for changes to webpage

Discussion of research "keywords":

• https://ofis.uwaterloo.ca/eng_research/expert_page.php -
• CS would find this useful.

Beth asked Daniel to eventually produce a spreadsheet for input/output data. Not in the next few weeks!

Upcoming Tasks:

• Tamir: ct'd bibtex
• Daniel: office of research question
  • has the office of research been asked for research data for last 7 years? if not, OFIS team can ask for the data to be imported into OFIS for the same timeframe. Daniel will ask Peter Forsyth.
    • Yuying Li is looking into it; hasn't gotten back to Daniel.
• Daniel: talking to Peter Forsyth tomorrow
• Daniel: possibly getting to annual report poking as well

-- DanielAllen - 05 Nov 2009