USAT - User System of Astrogeology Technologies

19 January 2012:
The team got together for the first time. We exchanged contact information and talked about what each memebr could bring to the table in terms of experience and skills.

25 January 2012:
The team met with our sponsors for the first time to discuss details about the project. Trent and Moses gave us a lot of information to consider, including the quantity and types of data we will be working with, uses cases, and even a few design ideas to get started with.

02 February 2012:
Initial website has been created. The site contains a basic overview of the project requirements, as well as a description of each team member, including a link to his resume. Additionally, all team team documents will be available on the website.

02 February 2012:
Some intial design ideas have been decided upon, such as using Nokia's QT framework for creating the graphical interface. Also researching GUI design and different methods for displaying workflow creation.

16 February 2012:
The team is investigating Galaxy, a workflow creation framework used for bioinformatics research. It could cut down significantly the amount of time spent creating the actual user inteface and allow the team to focus more on other useful features for the system.

09 February 2012:
The team presented our design ideas. The presentation went well, and we received a lot of valuable feedback from the CS faculty in attendance. Dr. Caporaso suggested we look into using Galaxy to create workflows, rather than designing an entirely new client interface.

23 February 2012:
Galaxy is looking more and more promising. We have installed Galaxy on our virtual machine to begin further evaluation. We are attempting to create an XML parser to convert tools from ISIS to Galaxy.

01 March 2012:
The tool builder for XML conversion isn't working as well as we had hoped. The two XML formats are similar, but there is enough variation between the individual tools to cause problems for automatic conversion. Instead we are focusing on manually converting enough tools for testing purposes.

22 March 2012:
A Tool Shed has been created using a separate Galaxy instance. This allows us to manage tools and data libraries. It is a repository, so things like version control and updates are already handled. Also, we have manually converted several tools to begin testing the capabilities of both Galaxy and the Tool Shed.

29 March 2012:
We set up a webserver and installed Galaxy and ISIS on it to use for further testing. One of the benefits of using Galaxy is that it is rendered in a web-browser, so it is very portable and can be run on a remote server to reach a broader audience.

10 April 2012:
We again presented our design and implementation progress to our fellow students and CS faculty. The presentation went very well and we continued to receive feedback and criticisms.

07 March 2012:
We submitted our design abstract for the UGRADS conference in April.

24 April 2012:
Final UGRADS presentation, dry-run. We got some last minute feedback before the UGRADS conference later in the week.

27 April 2012:
UGRADS conference and final presentation. Trent came down from USGS to see our progress. It went very well and everyone seemed very pleased with the product we've come up with.

06 May 2012:
One of the major aspects of this project was to create extensive documentation to assist new users of ISIS. This became even more important when we started using Galaxy because it is entirely new to everyone at the USGS. For this reason, we have spend a great amount of time writing tutorials to guide users through the successful deployment and administration of both Galaxy and the Tool Shed, as well as for creating or modifying additional tools.

09 May 2012:
The final report is finished and turned in. Additionally, all the documents and presentations we did throughout the semester are available to our advisor in their final form.

10 May 2012:
We have compiled all the necessary peices of our system into a single virtual machine image to hand over to our clients. This also includes all of the documentation and tutorials we wrote to help facilitate this transition.