If you missed it, I recently posted about the future direction of the DCXL project. I boiled it down to the question of Add-in versus web application. The community has offered feedback, and some major themes that have emerged, which I summarize below. But first, a reminder of the goods and bads of our two possible approaches:
| Web application | |
| Good | Bad |
| Easier to maintain, update | Requires learning new user interface |
| Use with any platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, …) | |
| Generalizable/extensible | Not integrated into Excel |
| Community involvement easier | Offline use may be limited |
| Excel Add-in | |
| Good | Bad |
| Integrated in workflow | Windows only |
| Familiar user interface & functionality | Install & updates required |
| Smaller shift in practice | Not as generalizable/extensible |
| Available offline | Not as easy for community to get involved in development, improvement |
It seems that there are strong feelings on both sides of this issue. The majority are excited about the web application, but there are some serious concerns about going whole hog into the web application realm. Most of this apprehension stems from two major issues: potential problems when offline, and the lack of a visible DCXL presence in the Excel program.
Offline use: Metadata is best collected at the time the data are collected, which means the scientist might not have an internet connection. We should make sure that any features associated with generating metadata are available offline.
DCXL presence within Excel:what if we devise a way to connect the Excel user directly to the web application from within Excel? A “Lite” version of the add-in?
If we assume that we can tackle the two problems above, then the web application might be a great direction to take. The DCXL project should focus on assisting scientists with metadata generation first, and connection to repositories second. Both of these tasks may be easier with a web application. Metadata generation could be aided by connecting to existing metadata schema and standards, which would be enabled by a generalizable API making connection easier. More interesting is the possibility for connecting with repositories and institutions; what if there was a repository-specific implementation of the DCXL web application for each interested repository? Or a DCXL web application specifically geared towards the Geology department at UC Riverside? The possibilities for connecting with existing services becomes more interesting if web connections are made easy.
Needless to say, we still want feedback from the community. Decisions will be made soon, so drop me an email or comment on the blog to make your voice heard.
