So I have an opportunity to attend an IASSIST conference in Edinburgh. How exciting! BYU‘s College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences
paid my way to demonstrate a software product I wrote for them. Many,
many thanks to them for giving me this opportunity, and allowing me to
share with the world what they have sponsored.
I wrote several
web sites to collect survey data over the web and present respondants
with immediate reports of how their responses fit a norm, and
acceptable levels for marriage with another respondant. After coding
the same things (and debugging) over and over, I decided to write a
reusable engine that does all the work, and more, and can share the
code across all the web sites. This engine uses DDI as its core questionnaire schema to define a codebook that the questionnaire is rendered from using XSLT.
The code for this surveying and reporting engine can be shared with the world, and shortly will be through a customized open source license.
I am not what I would call an open source freak, or even fanatic, but I
see it’s place, especially in the academic world, and I’m eager to
share this, because I see it as very useful generally, and I don’t want
to take the time to market it. I’ll post here again when it becomes
available. Probably on Novell Forge.
I have already put up a web site
where BYU professors can post surveys very quickly and easily and begin
collecting data over the web immediately. Soon I hope to put up a site
generally available to all universities at http://www.collegestudies.org. It’s not there yet though.