Student research opportunities
PrometheusWiki - various projects
Project Code: CECS_1012
This project is available at the following levels:
CS single semester, Masters
Supervisors:
Assoc Professor Shayne FlintDr Ramesh Sankaranarayana
Outline:
PrometheusWiki, a wiki for protocols in plant presents an exciting and novel approach to sharing knowledge in the fields of plant physiology, ecology and the environmental sciences. In the three years since its launch PrometheusWiki has garnered tremendous respect from colleagues in the field and now counts more than 1300 registered users from around the globe. Our site receives an average of 800 unique visitors each week (not counting search engines and other bots) with the most highly accessed protocols receiving more than 3000 visits since posting – more hits than most published papers could hope to be cited.
Our aim is to actively develop and maintain PrometheusWiki as an up-to-date resource with the most current consensus methods for plant science research around the world. The site provides a critical service to students and emerging researchers from developing, as well as developed, nations and provides a friendly ground for open debate on best practice among established researchers. Achieving our aim will require us to keep abreast of developments in software, new media and emerging technology so that we deliver an accessible, open, easy-to-use product to the user community. To this end we are looking to establish connections with ANU Computer Science project students to develop some novel aspects of the site.
Goals of this project
We have several projects available as described below.
Note that these projects could also be undertaken as part of TechLauncher. Contact the proposer for details.
Citation Management
We’d like to develop a simple tool to import citations from the wiki into common bibliographic software like endnote or procite, like most journal home pages where you can create a marked list of things you want to download citations for and that you can then download to your bibliographic program at the touch of a button.
Improved Comment System
We’d like to improve opportunities for commenting and communicating between authors and users of protocols. There is an existing comment system where the comments are added at the end but are only visible when users are logged in. The current system doesn’t provide the conversational aspect and so people don’t feel encouraged to comment because they feel under qualified or don’t want to insult a peer.
We’d like to make commenting more conversational where a user might post a question or observation inline about a particular section and the section editor or other users could respond inline with the whole conversation publically visible. Comments could be flagged as public or private or directed to a particular user. We’d also want ways for users to filter out comments (either all or by particular users) and to ‘vote’ on comments, etc. It also might help to let registered users make anonymous comments if they don’t want their name attached to the comment. Users might also have the option to select which of the commenting/editing features they want to turn on/off.
Improved User management
We’d like to improve the user interface and functionality of registering, navigating the site, submitting protocols, and getting approval for protocols. This might also include customising the 'breadcrumbs' function to make navigation more intuitive to users.
Another aspect of usability is improving the TikiWiki search function on the site to allow users to search specifically for protocols, background information pages, specific authors or the glossary. An extension of this would be easily being able to see things that are related to each other either by topic or by author group. For exmaple, we have introductions or summaries to our main topic areas. These are written by experts and are very useful, but they never get used because users search for protocols and then don't get direct back to the summary that overlies the area. We envisioned people navigating almost like they were using a table of contents in a book, where you'd look at the intro before leaping into the content. But that's not how people use it. So, we need a better way of directing them to 'the start' once they've found the content they're after.
Personalisation
We’d like to introduce more personalisation of the site so returning visitors are encouraged to revisit pages they have been to before and to add their comments, or are directed to other pages that may be relevant to them. Accomplishing this might involve incorporating elements analogous to the suggestions you get when returning to online shopping sites, or requests for reviews of purchases. LikeiThis also might include providing options for bookmarking or a specialised user designed homepage.
