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Agenda for the IT Online Working Group

Dear Colleagues

I said that I would circulate an agenda early in the new year
to guide our discussions on ways to put the IT volumes online -
with the aim to have recommendations for the Florence congress.
Please excuse my tardiness in doing this but the summer holidays
(downunder), our moving to new labs in Biomedicine (after 35 years
in Physics!) and my Volume G duties have waylaid this task.

However, things haven't been totally moribund on the ITOWG front
- you will have recently received a CD showing how Volume G
will provide HTML access. This CD is still being developed by
Brian McMahon but even at this early stage indicates some
relatively simple ways to access IT data online.  I have also
written to Bill Duax to request the expansion of the WG so
that all the different data types in the IT can be suitably
looked after. I happy to say that John Helliwell, Mike Glazer
and Howard Einspahr have agreed to join our working group.

Helen Berman has also agreed to be join us as an observer and
it may be that we should invite others involved in presenting
crystallographic data on the web to do the same. Please send
me your recommendations.

Its worth reiterating what the main purpose of the ITOWG.

1. We are to make recommendations on optimal (and innovative!)
approaches for putting IT volume data online.

2. We need not be concerned about the highly technical (web
language/presentation) issues associated with these approaches.

3. We definitely need not consider the economics of recommended
approaches, or the overall "cost-recovery model".

In a nutshell then, we are being asked for sensible approaches
to putting the different IT data types onto the web but we don't
need to worry about how to make them work or pay. Having said that,
I know that all of us are experienced enough with web approaches
not to put forward a totally impractical idea that will cost the
earth!

In addition to suggesting clever and practical ways of putting
IT data types online, we also need to assign some priorities
to which data are needed first and which is likely to be most
used. So far the WG has only discussed approaches to presenting
symmetry data, and we should now direct our attention to other
volumes. I haven't had a chance yet to summarise the suggestions
and points made so far about putting volume A online but I will
do so and circulate this prior to us agreeing on our final
recommendations.

To start a consideration of the other volumes, I attach some of my
brief comments on the volume B contents along with some possible
web approaches for an interactive presentation of mathematical
data. These notes by no means exhaust the options and are intended
only to initiate our discussions. Your comments are requested so
that we can arrive at some recommendations.

There is no need to confine our discussions to just B, though the
approaches we decide on for B will, in various degrees, apply to
the other volumes as well. Nevertheless there's quite likely to be
different access approaches needed for data in each volume - we
see this with with the software needed to access symmetry in A,
and certainly the big numerical tables in C will need to be directly
linkable to external software (e.g. modern programming languages
such as Python, Java and Jython can address these tables as
URLs and this may be one route).

And so on. Please circulate your comments and suggestions to all
members of the WG so that we can have open forum discussions.
I will not attempt to mediate on these discussions except to bring
them to an appropriate close when we need to make some
recommendations, or if its necessary to remind the WG of IT data
not yet considered.

Best wishes
Syd
------
Professor Sydney R. Hall
School Biomedical & Chemical Sciences
University of Western Australia
Crawley, 6009  AUSTRALIA.
Ph: +61 (8) 6488 2725
Fx: +61 (8) 6488 1118
"Data data everywhere but not a thought to think!" - Theodore Roszak

ITOWG_volB.doc

parsing_tex.pdf