BONUS prototype

BONUS is a 'Web 2.0' application being developed for The University of Portsmouth's Business School. It is in prototype/explatory phase.

This page is still under construction. In fact, right now it's mostly a placeholder.

Contents

Overview

Knowledge management is proving an increasing problem as the volume of electronic data increases. In the case of the University's Business School alone, thousands of stored documents nuzzle up against each other on the 'L Drive', in various categorisation schemes, naming conventions, and formats, with varying currency and validity.

Research shows a lot of time and effort can be wasted trying to locate the correct file for a given situation, or even determine if it exists. In addition, the University has its public web site, and its intranet, and internal web sites, and staff home pages, and so on... Other faculties make use of custom systems to provide informational tools; for example, the Faculty of Technology's TONIC.

However, these are essentially lists centrally managed by a third party, can suffer from problems such as link rot and top-down classification (e.g. guidelines for writing unit descriptions filed... under 'W' for Writing?)

BONUS, an acronym for Business ONline User System, under development as of March 2006, is a part prototype, part exploratory mockup to mt the above challenges. It leverages best practice with successful Web solutions (search engines, del.icio.us, etc.), and instead of a central list, models a metadatabase describing documents, forms, web pages, etc., into which staff and stuents can search, and which authorised users can describe documents. Users can also view, tag and update documents and assocaited metadata as needed. The application exposes multiple points of entry to the metadatabase to allow as much "findability" as possible.

Need to: discuss drivers; findability of document/knowledge managements, time wasted due to lack of 'findability', faculty-level prototype, similar systems, decision of agile develoment and document base/search engine approach , choosing of Rails for agile development, test-drive ndevelopment, easy to add RSS feeds etc.

Intent
  • Title
    • Sub content
    • And another
  • Create a document knowledge base
As at time of writing, the system is under agile development and being used by project team staff. Rollout will be on an organic basis.

Technical Info

  • Developed using agile methodology and Ruby on Rails, ideal for both a prototype that can also be deployed as a wider system. This also enabled leverage of the AJAX/Web 2.0 functionality expected of modern web apps.

Screenshots

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Home page
Live search in action
Document info page

If a user is logged in, there's a sliding panel allowing AJAX editing of certain fields
Documents can also be tagged, via an AJAX-powered treeview
Browsing of the document base is by multiple entry points, in this case, by tag