Behind the Scenes of DSWeb

By Jim Goldman and James Haines
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Jim on the left and James on the right

DSWeb, the Dynamical Systems portal web site of the SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems, originated from two motivations.

 

The task of creating and maintaining a web site for the activity group had fallen on one person's shoulders (Tim Sauer), who, all agree, had done a great job for a long time, but who was ready to transfer the webmaster role to others in order to move on to other projects. A mechanism was needed that would enable both shared and distributed responsibility for the content in the group's web site.

Around the same time that we were looking for such a mechanism, plans were coming together for the launch of the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems (SIADS).

 

SIADS was to be an electronic-only journal, including a heavy dose of digital imagery and visualization. John Guckenheimer and Marty Golubitsky saw an opportunity to leverage the momentum of the SIADS launch and establish a unified portal to gather and store information about the Dynamical Systems discipline that went beyond the activity group web page, and thereby complementing the more formal research results published in the journal. It was auspicious that these influences coincided.

Here at the SIAM office, we know that the challenges of building and maintaining a web site for a SIAM activity group (SIAG) are not unique to the SIAG on Dynamical Systems, but are clearly experienced by all twelve of our activity groups, with more groups anticipated in the future. Each SIAG faces the same challenge of finding a volunteer to carry the burden of maintaining the group's web site. Even SIAGs that are fortunate enough to have willing and industrious webmasters still face the inevitable problem of how to transition their web sites to successor webmasters as volunteers inevitably move on to other projects and priorities.

 

A transition can be complicated by a site's being hosted on "borrowed" infrastructure at the soon-to-be-previous webmaster's institution. We thought that we could provide a very valuable service to the SIAM community by hosting, here at the SIAM office, a web site content management system that would facilitate building and maintaining web content for each of our activity groups.

Although there were, and still are, numerous commercial solutions for shared web content management systems, our investigation led us to conclude that the existing systems either had too much of a corporate focus, and were therefore not amenable to SIAM's culture, or they were way beyond our means in terms of price, or both.

Using DSWeb as our initial foray into a distributed web-site responsibility model, and our first attempt at a unified discipline-specific portal, we successfully asked the National Science Foundation for support to write the software. SIAM Technical Director Bill Kolata marshaled the grant application through the maze of the NSF in 2001-2002. The DSWeb software development effort began in February 2002 and most of the planned functionality was completed in time for a public announcement at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, held at Snowbird, Utah in May of 2003.

 

As continual incremental enhancements get added to DSWeb, SIAM is considering how to roll out the software to other activity groups.

One factor that has made DSWeb such a success so far has been the keen interest and time commitments of the DSWeb section chief editors:

James Meiss: Glossary of Technical Terms
Hinke Osinga: DS Magazine
Mary Lou Zeeman: Activity Group
Tim Sauer: About the DS Profession
Dirk Roose: DS Software
Àngel Jorba: Tutorials
Arnd Scheel: Picture Gallery
Eugene Wayne: Newsgroup

DSWeb follows a streamlined peer-review model. Contributions may be made by anyone, and indeed are encouraged so that the content of the site will ultimately truly reflect what is going on across the Dynamical Systems community. Two approvals are required, however, before a contributed item is displayed for public view.

First the section chief editor (or a designated section editor) reviews the item for content and appropriateness, and gives his or her approval. Then the portal administrator (presently James Haines in the SIAM office) reviews the item for grammatical correctness, valid hyperlinks, consistency of formatting, and gives his approval. Only then does an item become visible on the site, thus ensuring the overall quality of DSWeb.

DSWeb is built on a totally open-source technology platform. The site is entirely database driven: each web page with content is created dynamically based on the state of the database at the moment a browser request is received by the server. The database is PostgreSQL. The content management engine is written in the Perl programming language. The web server is Apache, and the system runs on a multiprocessor Linux-based Compaq Proliant machine.

Two SIAM staff members in particular have been very involved in the development and operation of DSWeb. Jim Goldman, in the SIAM Information Systems Department, is the principal software designer and programmer. James Haines, in SIAM's Editorial Department, oversees the volunteers as they contribute and review entries in the database. James also finds many of Jim's bugs.

Jim Goldman has worked for SIAM since 1985 in several capacities. He began as a part-time consultant while in graduate school in the mid 1980s, when his first SIAM development effort was a Manuscript Tracking System for papers submitted to SIAM's journal peer-review process. In 1991, Jim became a full-time employee; he formed SIAM's Information Systems Department and managed the growth of SIAM's computing infrastructure and network from just two computers way back when, to over a hundred computers today.

 

This year, Jim stepped down from his managerial position to become a part-time programmer, and focus on DSWeb and other development projects. His real motivation, however, was his entry into the Drexel University Doctoral program in Information Science and Technology this fall.

James Haines joined SIAM in 2001 as the newly created Online Content Coordinator. In a nutshell, James's unique position means that anything at SIAM regarding DSWeb or SIADS goes to him. As a multimedia publishing specialist, James is always on hand to assist with creating, formatting, and editing movie and image files as well as to help with anything involving online and traditional publishing.

 

In his spare time, James is a very prolific comedy writer and is currently rewriting J. R. R. Tolkien's entire

Lord of the Ring

trilogy as if Monty Python had done the movie screenplays instead of Peter Jackson.

 

DSWeb Snowbird
DSWeb editorial board after a long late-night meeting following the BBQ at the Snowbird meeting, May 2003. Back row from left to right: Eugene Wayne, Bernd Krauskopf (representing Àngel Jorba), Kurt Lust (representing Dirk Roose), Arnd Scheel, Mary Lou Zeeman, and James Meiss; front row from left to right: Hinke Osinga, Tim Sauer, John Guckenheimer, Jim Goldman, and James Haines.
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