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. The web site directory is rooted at /pro/graphics/visweb.
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:
- people - named by linux login, these include lab members and close collaborators
- pubs - named by Author-Year-ThreeLetterTitleAcronym, this describe publications the lab has created
- projects - named with some short name, these are specific research projects
- themes - named like projects (but uniquely), these capture themes that cross projects
bib faqs images faq talks videos
Visweb Software
The primary version of the scripts used for visweb is checked into CVS under <tty>project/visweb/</tty>. The public installed copy is installed in /map/gfx0/tools/linux/install_linux/bin/visweb/. If you have created a sandbox using the standard creation process you will also have a copy in <sandbox>/install_linux/bin/visweb/. Once you have a sandbox environment established you can installed a copy there with these commands:
<sandbox>% cvs co project/visweb <sandbox>% cd project/visweb <sandbox>/project/visweb% make install