Guidelines for preparing information for the SITE Research Web

The creation of the SITE Research Web was decided in relation with the Faculty Research Day which was held in February 2007. The principles of its organization are described here. The following are some guidelines that explain what kind of information we try to present in these Web pages about research at SITE. The target audience are our prospective students and industrial partners.

The SITE Research Web is structured by research area. For each research area, the following information should be provided:

1. Description: This text should describe the research area, the open problems to be solved, research issues and major results expected in the future.
2. Applications: This text should describe the main fields of application where the research results obtained in this area could be used, or are being used.
3. Professors: for each professor listed under the research area: please indicate the particular expertise or area of interest within this research area (note, a professor may be mentioned under several research areas). If the professor has an individual web page about his own research group, a pointer to this web page is appended to his name under the expression "(group)".
4. Research groups involving several professors: Existing Web sites documenting long-term research collaborations are mentioned here. (Note: Research collaboration is a good thing in general. If it is documented by a Web site, we can show it. Web sites describing a particular project, which may also involve collaboration, should be mentioned under the List of Projects).
5. Leadership: Mention here research high-lights, spectacular results, or a particular topic in which we are "First in Canada" or "First in the World"; if applicable mention international recognition of our strength.
6. List of recent projects: Please provide a descriptive title, a short description of the research objective (3 to 4 lines of text), the name of the principal investigator, major funding sources, and industrial partners (very important). Links to more detailed project descriptions are appreciated, also links to the partners' Web sites. An example of a detailed list of project can be found on the Robotics web page, although the descriptions may be a bit too long.
7. Slide show: The original versions of these slide shows were prepared for the Faculty Research Day (February 2007). I find the following to be some interesting examples: Photonics, Information Management and Data Mining.

Note: If a project or a research high-light is related to two research areas (and the principal investigator is part of these areas) then these items may be listed twice.

Procedure for maintaining the SITE Research Web

• Each professor should send his information concerning items (3), (5) and (6) above to the Research Area Coordinator (see name on the bottom of the respective area Web page).
• The area coordinator should aggregate the above information and send it to the research-web-master (currently Gregor v. Bochmann). The area coordinator is also responsible for maintaining the content of items (1), (2), (4), and (7).
• Creation and updating of web pages describing research of professors or collaborations: There are the following possiblities:
  • If you have a page among our current research pages, it would be good to update it, since these pages are already relatively old. Since the information of these pages is stored in a database, you have to contact the webmaster of the Faculty (Pierre Renaud <engweb@uottawa.ca>) if you want to update your information.
  • You can also create your own web page and place it in some suitable Web directory. For instance, my own research group web page is stored under http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~bochmann/dsrg/index.html. Many professors have taken this approach.
  • Pierre Renaud told me that he is planning to create a framework, based on a content management system, which facilitates the creation and updating of Web pages according to a particular format. This could be used, hopefully within a couple of months, to create personal research web pages.
  • Note: In the initial draft of the SITE Research Web, I have tried to provide pointers to all research web pages that exist currently at SITE. Please let me know, if I overlooked anything

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Gregor v. Bochmann, September 28, 2007