DEVELOPERS: Questions to Ponder
We want to represent the Information Structure of Seton Hall University Main Campus. You are the developers to be charged with writing programs to turn the Web site into an interactive web site. One basic feature would be a search fea ture. You looked at three different search engines, and here are some questions for you to ponder about searching:
| What are the basic features of the three search engines, and what are their differences, if any |
| What type of software/hardware requirements does each one have |
| What is the cost of each engine |
| Which one seems the fastest; which one seems the most flexible |
| Which one seems most suitable to our task, if any |
To answer the last question in particular, you need to worry about questions such as:
| What exactly do we want to search for ? (Lab locations, opening times, hardware, software, contact person, etc) |
| How many databases do we need to maintain; what's their projected size |
| How does data get into the database ? |
| How does data get into the Web client ? |
| What type of searches do we want (for example, exact, substring, boolean, soundex, probabalistic, errors allowed, etc) ? Do we need 'bigger than' and 'less than' searches for times and/or prices ? |
Finally, we will need some 'simple' scripts, written in Perl. One example of a script we will surely need is a 'mailin' script, i.e. we want to be able to offer a user a form, and the filled-out form should be mailed to some address when the user hits the 'submit' button.
| Locate the 'mailin' script on 'pirate.shu.edu' |
| Modify that script so that it will work for our web site |
Here are a few suggestions for some details of our website, things that we may or may not want to do. All questions above should be viewed with these (or similar) suggestions in mind.
| We need page for each lab on campus, showing the location, layout, computer types, opening hours, etc of each |
| We want to find where a particular hardware item is located, how we get there, when it's available |
| We need detailed descriptions of the software that's available in labs and in general |
| We need a list of people available for help |
| We may want: real-time 'load' report (i.e. which computers at what labs are busy/free), which person is located where in real time, etc |
| Searchable FAQ list, where people can search for questions about computers, lab, wordperfect, email, or everything else. |