I am not a programer as are none of the people I work with (all doctors and neurscience types). We have come up with an idea that would let us annotate and edit online publicly available papers (ie pubmed.com available paters). We believe this idea is feasible due to a plethora of research we have peformed; furthermore, if it is possible it would greatly ease our burden when conducting initial research. The problem now is confirming that the idea is indeed feasible and getting a basic layout of how it might be solved and what programming languages would be best suited for its implementation. We need this info before we can to pursue a grant. How would one go about solving this problem? Is there a forum to visit or a group to ask? Our basic plan is to provide and indepth road map of what we would like and then get advice on on what kind of hardware infractructure would be needed as well as the assortment of programming languages that would best fit. Can somebody make a recommendation on how to take the first step? If this post is not clear, please let me know and I will try to better explain what I mean. Warm regards, Ryan
start wiith the data reports that you would like generated from this website. Make a complete set of reports with sample data making sure that it would cover just about any situation. A database is only as good as the data you can get out of it. So starting with the reports, we could determine the table structure and needed relationships needed to accomodate your data. The next step is to plan the website layout. Just like they do with cartoons, draw webpages on plain paper, how you would like the menus, what menu options, how specific the searching should be, how you picture the data to be displayed for you, as well as input tables, to input the data. Put these in a kind of order but realize not everyone that clicks a menu option in the same way everyone else does. Once you have this data, you will need to get a hold of a good web development company submit the data, either written or scanned ( depending on distance ) and ask them which OS and language they would use. I would personally reccomend A windows server using ASP pages, but that may be cost preventative, a Linux server with MySQL running php pages would also do the job fine. Let your webmaster or developer in on the decision if they are more comfortable with one rather than the other, it's because they are used to programming in the language and will be able to produce your web app faster. You will also need to decide if you are going to host it yourself, you will need a high speed internet connection and a server and at least one person comfortable with maintaining it. ( you should really have 2 servers in seperate locations as failover ). Or if you will have a hosting company maintain the server and backups. Hope you understand all of that. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask
Thank you for your help, you have given me a great place to start. When I have refined my questions I hope I can come back if I need some more help. Warm regards, ryan
