Requirements
This document outlines the project requirements. Each section works to paint a picture of what the system must do, and in some cases what it will not be doing. The document begins with a high level over-view and drills down in detail. The most detailed section is the User Stories, which contain itemized and categorized descriptions of specific features, and whether or not they will be handled in the minimal viable product (MVP).
At the University of Alberta the General Faculties Council (GFC) and it’s standing committees discuss issues and make decisions regarding the future of courses, instruction, and policy at the university. The content of these meetings are public record, but as they stand are incredibly difficult to filter and find relevant information for a given topic.
Therefore, the first objective of this project is to provide a search service for the minutes of the various standing GFC committees, to support transparency with the public.
Additionally, a secondary objective is to add a system that will scan these minutes and parse out various topics into a database - enabling basic visualizations and deeper question asking systems to be built upon this one in the future.
Citizen: A citizen is anyone who uses the services provided by the application. The citizen is able to perform queries and view it's results. Citizens may have limited knowledge as to what data they can find.
Admin: An admin is anyone who has control of the back end of the application. The admin has the ability to add or remove information that can be queried by a citizen.
Member: A member is anyone who belongs to any governing board or produces the documents. A member is also a citizen, but has inherent knowledge of what can be found through the application.
Sharepoint: Repository of all raw data where data dumps originate from. Contains all governance information.
Data Dump: Excel files created from Sharepoint. Data dumps contain information regarding committees, members, departments etc.
Entities: Words or key phrases a system uses to recognize content.
Basic Search: A 1 word search. Results of basic search returned in 2 seconds or less.
Advanced Search: Up to a 7 word search. Results of advanced search returned in 5 seconds or less.
Interactive Visualization: Display of search results frequency that a citizen or member can interactive with.
GFC: General Faculties Council, a body of administrative staff at the University of Alberta who make larger decisions regarding the future of classes and instruction. Analyzing data produced from their meetings is the focus of this project.
Structured Data: Excel data dump offered by the client, containing information about committee names and attendance.
Please find the UI Navigation Diagram on this page.
A similar working example of the visualization can be found here.
Please note that the visualization for the results page is subject to change. Nevertheless, the flow of the diagram will not change (e.g., advanced search page => results page).
For the visualization, we are considering the following alternatives:
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Story Map
- Every 'story' is a mention; every 'column' is a committee; each month is a 'row'. This way, all meetings across all committees in the same month are in the same row. Selecting a mention will show the user the item he or she is searching for, as opposed to scrolling through a list.
For this project we decided to use "User Stories" to help clarify and specify the requirements of the project. User stories are short descriptions of actions certain users will take to accomplish specific tasks. This way, if in the final deliverable product if those stories can be accomplished we know that the product requirements have been met. Please view the list of User Stories on this page.
- Elasticsearch for search functionality
- VueJS for Frontend HTML/CSS/JQuery
- Django for Backend web framework
- Apache Tika for PDF scraping
- Logstash for ingesting structured data
- Vis.js for visualizations
- Nginx and Gunicorn for deployment
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City of Edmonton Council and Committee Meetings Motions
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City of Calgary Council and Committee Agendas, Minutes