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World Wide Web Diary
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Proposal
There are numerous proprietary electronic diary systems. Some
corporate systems allow restricted access to each individual's
diary. This, for example, allows meetings to be scheduled (or at
least sensible times to be suggested) by querying some public form of
each participant's diary. The public form might simply indicate
whether somebody is busy at a particular time perhaps with some
indication of how movable other commitments might be. The model
could be extended to allow different groups to obtain different
elisions of a diary.
Extensions
Without much thought it is apparent that there are numerous
extensions. For example, the user could be reminded of a meeting by
sending a message to their pager. An interface to a portable
electronic organiser would also be useful together with suitable
software to update changes when back at base. A supervisor might like
to arrange supervisions by specifying convenient times leaving
students to battle over these slots.
Previous work and new directions
There have been several versions of this project. All of the current
ones have relied on a "thin client", i.e. a dumb browser. The advent
of Java allows for a more intelligent client and thus a better
interface.
Special resources
An account on a machine which supports WWW CGI scripts. Ideally this
would be the students own private Linux box.
Possible supervisors
I've supervised this project before and am not inclined to do so again
unless somebody comes up with a good variation on the theme. However,
many Ph.D. students in the lab. could supervise this project.
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