The Directory of Canadian Researchers in International Security (DCRIS) is sponsored by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies (MSDS). From the Centre's web site:
The purpose of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies is to foster research, teaching, and public discussion of military and strategic issues of national and international significance. The Centre was founded in 1991 with support from the Military and Strategic Studies programme (now the Security and Defence Forum) of Canada's Department of National Defence.
NOTE: The official DCRIS website was retired in 2007 due to funding cutbacks.
The DCRIS public website allows users to call up lists of researchers, along with their publications and various expertises. The website allows researchers (and anyone else interested) to communicate with others who share the same interests in international security or military history. The site is open to the public. A second DCRIS website is for administrative users only and allows the MSDS staff to update the DCRIS database remotely. The websites' current incarnations were implemented by David Brown in 1999, and are updated as software and techniques change.
A typical Directory entry contains information about a member: their name, institutional affiliation, telephone number, fax number, and email address. Each member has areas of broad expertise in military and security issues: these are listed as a member's keywords. members also have other areas of narrow expertise: these are called Supplementary keywords and are organized by topic into Lists. Lastly, members may have pubs related to military and security topics. This is a typical Directory entry.
| Institution: | Wilfrid Laurier University |
| Address: | Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo ON N2L 3C5 |
| Telephone: | (519) 884-1970 x4208 |
| Fax: | (519) 886-5057 |
| Email: | mkilgour@wlu.ca |
keywords (Areas of Broad Expertise)
Lists (Areas of Narrow Expertise)
pubs
The DCRIS public website itself is not particularly complex. In fact, a user sees only eight different pages. However, the data pages are dynamically generated and the data displayed depends on the contents of the DCRIS database and on the search criteria entered by the user. Thus the web site is always up to date and flexible in terms of the DCRIS data displayed.
The DCRIS websites and database can be represented using UML diagrams and reports. The examples given here use only use case and class diagrams. Although a case could be made for using some of the other UML diagrams (state, sequence, and activity diagrams, for example), for the purposes of this course use case and class diagrams are sufficient to make clear the design and use of the websites and database. The associated reports give details not shown in the UML diagrams. The diagrams and reports were created with MagicDraw UML 15.5.
The DCRIS use case diagram shows the functionality the DCRIS public website offers: to display all members of the Directory, or to enter search criteria based upon a member's name, institution, or expertise.
The DCRIS database class diagram shows the structure of the database containing the member information. Database tables are represented using class diagrams (with the stereotype «table»). Columns are given as attributes. Links between tables are given as foreign key dependencies. SQL procedures and functions could have been represented as operations, but have been left out for simplicity's sake. The database operations used by the DCRIS website appear in the DCRIS web site class diagrams.
As noted in the use cases, the DCRIS public website allows any user to look up DCRIS members either by their name, institution, or expertise, as well as getting a complete list of all members. You may use the site at the DCRIS Home Page.
The following UML diagram uses Web Extensions to show the structure of the public website:
The DCRIS administrative websites will be discussed in detail later.
The documents and diagrams provided here are but an introduction to the DCRIS database and websites, and are not a comprehensive description of them. Further information is provided in lecture.