Case Study - PHORMS
Hyperspheric Solutions has been working closely with a consortium of
Public Health Observatories (PHOs) to specify, design, develop and maintain an "engine"
to drive their web sites. the outcome is the Public Health Observatory Resource Management System (PHORMS).
The PHORMS engine was developed to meet the needs of a variety of different user groups.
Given the complexity of the requirements for the engine,
the PHOs were able to achieve significant cost savings over an approach that
involved the development of 5 independent web sites.
Facilities to help users do their jobs:
- A "simple search" for first-time users and advanced searching for expert users.
- Wizards to guide users through the contribution process and to simplify site management.
- A contact directory and supporting tools such as an events calendar to help site users to network with each other.
- Single sign-on between PHORMS sites and other systems.
Facilities to help users find what they are looking for:
- A powerful search engine with support for complex boolean conditions, federated searching,
caching and paging of results and translation between schemas for searching of heterogeneous sites.
- A "metadata cache" for rapid access to metadata harvested from other PHORMS and non-PHORMS sites.
- Use of the Public
Health Language (PHL) thesaurus to enhance search terms entered by users.
- Secure federated searching between PHORMS sites and other systems.
Facilities to help site managers keep information up to date:
- A resource management system adhering to Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.
- Content management tools, including a PHORMS-specific dialect of Wikitext and a menu editor.
- Fine-grained access control to specify exactly who can access which resources.
- Mechanisms to manage workflows such as processing registration requests and identifying resources whose metadata is due for review, etc.
- Reporting tools to help manage resource through the identification of potential duplicates, etc.
- Automated harvesting, caching and replication of metadata between sites.
Five PHOs currently use the PHORMS system, with each using their own "skin" on top of the engine developed by Hyperspheric:
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