Visweb

Visweb is the mostly-public, mostly-static website for the VRL, located at http://vis.cs.brown.edu. It contains a list of people, projects, publications, images, references, and reading lists, all of which are currently submitted by users through an offline process, and then the entire website is re-rendered to reflect the new information. This is because Visweb is hosted on the department's standard web servers, which do not allow dynamic content. An eventual rewrite of the site with a more intuitive online submission process, or perhaps wholly dynamic rendering of the website, is expected. This page exists to document the features of Visweb and how to work with them.

While this page is under construction, it's probably useful for you to check out the old Visweb FAQ.

VisWeb

Introduction

VisWeb is a set of relatively simple text files that describe the research of the visualization research lab. It includes a file for each person, project, publication, and research theme, among other things. Each of these is an entity. More details on this below. A set of scripts run over this source directory to create a set of interlinked static html pages along with related non-html files like pdf's and images.

Each type of entity (e.g., person, project, etc), within this structure has its own subdirectory of text files. There is one text file for each entity. Each file contains information about the entity itself as well as information about how it relates to other entities. The types of entities are:

1. people - named by linux login, these include lab members and close collaborators
2. pubs - named by Author-Year-ThreeLetterTitleAcronym, this describe publications the lab has created
3. projects - named with some short name, these are specific research projects
4. themes - named like projects (but uniquely), these capture themes that cross projects

bib faqs images faq talks videos

Website Structure

Updates are propagated from a collection of source entities to the web site. Entities are stored in /research/graphics/common/visweb/; which can also be reached through the link /pro/graphics/visweb/. To add entities go to the subdirectory corresponding to the type of entity you want to add and make your changes.

After making your changes run the script from a Linux computer /research/graphics/tools/visweb/bin/viswebupdate.sh to regenerate the website. This script can also be reached through the link at /research/graphics/tools/visweb/bin/viswebupdate.

The viswebupdate.sh script first runs make in /research/graphics/common/visweb to generate updates files for all entities and copy them to the primary web site. The primary web site has a complete image of the web site in /pro/web/web/research/vis/. As part of this process make is run on the the primary website to reconstruct viewable html files. Once the primary website is constructed webupdate is run to publish it on the CIT web server. For additiohnal details on webupdate see [[1]].

Visweb Software

The primary copies of the scripts used to generate the website are stored in CVS under project/visweb/ and the working copies are installed in /research/graphics/tools/visweb/bin/. For compatibility with legacy procedures links to the scripts are in /research/graphics/tools/linux/bin/.

To modify the visweb scripts check out a copy, make your edits, install the scripts, test them, and if they work okay check in your changes.

<sandbox>%  cvs co project/visweb        # Check out the visweb project.
<sandbox>%  cd project/visweb            # Then make your changes.
<sandbox>/project/visweb%  make install

Note that changes are tested on the live web page so be very careful and check the results thoroughly.