Pinfox system was developed within NDM (Nuffield Department of clinical Medicine), they use the system to enter information about their research, which includes research activity information, some bits of finance, costing, grants. It supports most of their administrative processes. They generate reports with it and populate some parts of their website. So it allows them to control their research projects on a daily basis (an operational system).
On the meeting from Pinfox: Claire-Lise Kessler and Karen Valentine
Website of NDM came out in october 2008. It is centralised, one single point of entry, and theme for all departments.
Biggest sponsor: Welcome Trust
Check the area of ‘Principal Investigators’ within NDM, there is a nice way of showing profiles. Publications’ area in Pinfox 2 only shows 8 entries (and no logs about which ones were deleted). Pinfox 3 would get publication information from pubmed, allowing the owner to choose which publication to show and ‘technology exchange’ keyword is considered as ‘methodology’.
Administrators, head of departments and PIs have access to grants and fellowships.
Editing profile is done online, permission for publishing on internet/intranet/private according to user’s wish.
Pinfox3 will have web administration only. Reports from Oracle (manually). Windows tool for admin/head of dept uses SQL queries and then export the results into PDF, CSV, etc.
System detect problems: projects without PI, grants running out > email is sent to inform user/researcher that a project is finishing.
Stats on pages that people profile’s are visited.
Our wishlist for them:
- Pinfox > Json (machine readable format)
- Atoms feed for the updates
- linked data
