Distributome Update November 11, 2011

Distributome Project infrastructure developments as of November 11, 2011:

  • Web-site:
    • Updated the web-site and the host server (improved response time)
    • Navigator Updates
  • Modification – we are still working on the Distributome DB Editor – a graphical interface would allow anyone to modify, expand, correct, save and submit revisions to the DB.
  • Clean-up: We’ll initiate DB clean up (with help from students and the community) as soon as the Graphical Distributome Editor is available
  • Bibliography (Reference Manager) – we are exploring BibJSON and are trying to identify the best protocol for retrieval (put/generate/make/edit/revise) existing and commit (call/retrieve/search) new biblio/reference items.

Distributome Update November 04, 2011

  • Abstracted the old Java resources as “legacy”.
  • Introduced “Tech Docs” and “License” pages. Please scan over and let me know if we need updates.
  • Fixed a number of bugs in the Distributome Navigator, improved functionality, enhanced display of meta-data in properties panels (according to SAB recommendations). Still working on improving the Navigator (e.g., displaying fewer nodes/distributions, by default).

Distributome Usability Training Video

We need to script and produce a 5-10 minute video representing the functionaility of the Distributome Infrastudcture. Example script could include:

  1. What is the Distributome Project? Team? History? Goals? Vision?
  2. Why are Probability Distributions interesting and useful as models (math, bio, computation)?
  3. The 5 Distributome Use-Cases (distribution property and inter-distribution relation exploration, sampling/simulation, computation, modeling)
  4. HTML5 Navigator (Navigator functionality, browser/device agnostic)
  5. Distribution Properties (nodes), Inter-distributional relations (edges), references (citations)
  6. Distributome XML DB Editor (under development), include technical info about XML/XSD format
  7. Distributome Web-Service (under development)
  8. Community Contributions
  9. Classroom utilization and learning activities
  10. Future developments

Distributome Project Updates: October 10, 2011

  • Latest Distributome Navigator is now completely functioning and uses the new Distributome.xml XML DB/XSD — albeit it’s a bit buggy, but we’ll resolve these in the next 1-2 weeks.
  • I drafted a Navigator (V.2) redesign mock-ups. See these images:
    • Example 1
    • Example 2
    • We’re working on implementing this (hope to get it for the SAB meeting, but in the worst case we can show the current HTML5 version (V.1) and the redesign blueprints.
  • Reconciling the Old XML DB and the New XML DB. This is a bit of a challenge. We have 2 grads working on this, but they are not quite up to par yet. Any help with grads that are well-trained in probabilistically and computationally (e.g., Web-discovery and XML syntax) would be greatly appreciated. Basically, we need to expand the New Distributome.xml using the old meta-data and includes the number of nodes/relations in the graph.
  • Cleaned and updated the Distributome.xml syntax to pass the Distributome XML/DB Validator and allow more functionality.
  • All code (HTML, XML, JS) is on SVN, includes log-change.
  • There are 2 critical things to achieve in Fall’11.
    • SAB progress/demo/vision
    • Distributome utilization in classroom.