Original CollabFinder Specifications
Vision Statement
To create a centralised, user friendly web-based tool to find diverse
personnel within the BCCA, both current and past, by their expertise for
collaboration, advice or giving presentations.
About the BCCA
The BC Cancer Agency, an agency of the Provincial Health Services
Authority, provides a province-wide, population-based cancer control
program for the residents of British Columbia and the Yukon. The BC
Cancer Agency’s mandate covers the spectrum of cancer care, from
prevention and screening, to diagnosis, treatment, and through to
rehabilitation. In addition to being the primary provider healthcare
provider in the region for cancer patients, the BCCA has a research
centre, the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre (BCCRC), dedicated
to not only finding the causes of cancer, but to finding better
treatments for prolonged life and better quality of life.
About this Project
This project is funded by a portion of a Michael Smith Foundation for
Health Research infrastructure grant. These funds are to be used to
facilitate the exchange of ideas and information between clinical and
research staff, in the aims of ultimately improving patient care and
outcomes.
General Properties
- The system will have a “read-only” portion visible to the public.
- The system will also have an administrative interface, restricted to
the BCCRC internal network, and requiring authentication via the
BCCRC authentication system.
- The system should integrate with the new BCCRC website. Note: this
is currently under development as a Plone site. The current plan for
integration is to provide templates for PIs to use to populate
entries for the staff under them. We have some ability to influence
the design/development of that site.
- Population of the database will be carried out separately, following
development
System Components
The desired functionality can be broken up into four main components:
# A page or pages displaying information about a single person
# A search page for finding personnel
# A page or pages for editing information about a single person
# An administrative interface for creating and deleting personnel
View Person Page(s)
- Must display all the information about a person, on a single or
multiple pages
- Should provide links from the keyword fields to searches based on
those keywords
Update Person Page(s)
- Must enable all information about a person to be edited
- Must be access restricted to only the person’s account it
corresponds to, and administrators
- Should enable internal collaborators to be found and linked
correctly
- Should suggest keywords for the keyword fields based on keywords
that have already been used
- Should enable publications to be imported by PubMed ID
- Could detect other authors’ names on a publication and allow for the
publication to be linked to their profiles too
Search Page
- Must allow searching by any of the fields captured about a person
- Must allow further filtering of search results by other fields
- Must display a list of search results containing basic information
about personnel (name, department, position) as well as the fields
searched against.
- Must contain links to personnel pages for each person in search
results
- Must have a secured feature to generate printable output (as HTML),
containing any combination of fields for the list of personnel found
- Could have a function to export search results as CSV
Administration Page(s)
- Must allow users to be created and deleted New accounts should be
linked to BCCRC authentication
- Should send an email to new users on creation on how to keep their
account up to date