ECS-TV System Details

ECS-TV Interactive provides a front end for submission of data to a 3Store which inports RDF data, storing facts as triples. 3Store is also able to make intferences upon this data to discover new facts as show below in figure 6.1 where we show a quick recap on the triple and shows how inferences are drawn.

The extensible nature of the ECS-TV system provides much opertunity for expansion outside the School of Electronics and Computer Science. This includes to other universities as well as other Schools at the University of Southampton. Unfortunatly these other organisations will be limited to using the current ontology and structure of the system for defining their own institutes, thus having to break them down into Schools and Research Groups.

In order to handle such a large amount of data as defined by the ontology whilst remaining extensible for future expansion it was decided to create an XML syntax to define the data which users can input on the various forms. This data would be directly linked to the ontology requiring minimal changes needing to be performed if this ontology was updated.

Form Data

An overview on which data the ECS-TV interactive system requires is given in the section on Database Structure. This data corresponds almost exactly to that which can be input on each form within the web interface, with each table corresponding to a single form or section. ECS-TVs webservers use PHP to read the XML data corresponding to the requested form and draw this on the screen ready to be filled in.

Defining a Form
    The XML document contains one section per form. This section contains many values which represent the different fields to be displayed on that form:

   Section Attributes:
      These define the global properties of the form:

   Value Attributes:
      Value attributes define each field on the form which the user can fill in. There are many types of value attributes and each takes a different set of data to define their behaviour.

     Types of Value Attribute
        HTML forms have many methods of inputing data and the ECS-TV XML syntax supports 4 types of input field outlined below in Figure 6.4:

     Global Attributes:
        Figure 6.4a shows the global attributes which can be set for all four types of input field on the form.

     Input AND Select type:
        Figure 6.4b shows attributes which can be set for input (single line) and select types:

     Input (single line text) only:
        Figure 6.4c shows the fields which are recognised when intending to use a single line text field:

     Select Type only:
        Figure 6.4d shows attributes which are only applicable to fields of type select. Note that when the value in a select field is changed the form refreshes to enable any validation of the input data to take place.

     Textarea Type only:
        Figure 6.4e shows attributes which are only applicable to fields of the type textarea.

     Special Types of Value Attribute
        There is currently one type of special value attribute which does not define an item of data on the form. This defines any style which can be embeded in the form to split up the layout, commonly this is just a horizontal rule accross the page <hr/>. Only the name and type attributes are allowed in this type of field.

An example:
    With such a powerful syntax it can become easy to get lost so below is an example. Figure 6.6 is the XML data which draws the submission page for a course lecture, a brief description before each line should assist as a guide to what this achieves.