Testing the Footprints Knowledgebase:
why we decided not to use it
Rachel Anderson (randers@stsci.edu), 8/6/2013 The purpose of the knowledgebase is to have a way to disseminate all of the useful information that is created in answering help calls, so rather than only one astronomer benefit from the hard work of STScI in answering their question other astronomers with similar questions can benefit. This will save effort for STScI but also for the astronomical community. To be effective, we want the knowledgebase titles, questions, and answers to be accessible by a Google search. We also want to give the community the capability of voting on the usefulness of questions and their answers to enable some sort of sorting on popularity of the question. Spitzer’s knowledgebase is a good example of what we were looking for: http://sohelp2.ipac.caltech.edu/support/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List We hoped to use the Footprints Knowledgebase in this fashion and took this into consideration when choosing Footprints as our help desk software. Below I describe the steps we took to enable Footprints to fulfill this purpose, what was discovered in the process, and why we decided to not use Footprints in this capacity but instead to move forward with JWST forum. The Footprints Knowledgebase Agents are able to submit tickets to be included in the knowledgebase via the Footprints interface. Administrative users are notified and able to accept the articles and make them either public or private. If they are public they are viewable outside STScI via this link (specified in Footprints):
https://footprints.stsci.edu/proj3.html Since the ‘proj3’ section of this URL is ambiguous, Valerie Ausherman created a page for us with a more descriptive URL that points to the one specified in Footprints. That URL is: footprints.stsci.edu/knowledgebase.html We created a sample of public knowledgebase articles that are now viewable outside STScI at this URL. Readers have the ability to vote on the usefulness of the articles. We also have the ability of categorizing these articles, which would enable better sorting by users. We could post this link wherever help@stsci.edu is mentioned, and on all automatic replies from Footprints to alert the community of its existence, however we decided not to make use of the knowledgebase feature. The Problem with the Footprints Knowledgebase The problem with the above page is that it is not accessible by a Google search. Valerie Ausherman and Alex Yermolaev worked on this but were not able to get it to work. Note that for testing we posted the link on Charles-­‐Philippe Lajoie’s personal page at STScI so that Google may find it. Valerie contacted Numara about this issue and we were basically told that this would not be possible. Numara’s full response is included in the Appendix. The work-­‐around suggested was to basically clone the Footprints knowledgebase page onto an STScI public webpage. Valerie could give us permission to access the Footprints database, and we could write a script to query the necessary information and create an updated html file. We could write a cron job to update this file at a given frequency. There are several problems with this approach. If we want users to be able to search based on text in the question and answer, we would have to include this information on the STScI public webpage. If we do that, instead of pointing users to the individual question’s Footprints page, we loose the capability of voting. If we point users to the individual question’s Footprints page, it would be difficult to write a script to guess at the URL of that page. It would take a much greater amount of effort for someone to implement the sorting capability that Footprints had on the STScI webpage. Finally, somebody would have to upload the updated html file (or more than one if each question / answer is on its own page) into Zope. Conclusions Our current plan is to move to a forum setting. The AstroDrizzle team (with input from the JWST mission office) has chosen Vanilla for their forum. This will be up and running soon, and will be a test bed for the JWST forum to launch date TBD. Agents will most likely be responsible for oversight of the forum, and will have the ability of posting ‘knowledgebase’ type articles (with origins as Footprints tickets) on the forum. Appendix Below is Numara’s response to Valerie’s request about the Footprints knowledgebase being indexed by Google. The customer portals entry point url .html file is stored in the ../footPrints/html directory. However, this directory/folder is not specific to any workspace or knowledge base. The entry point url files are stored in the 'html' directory and the knowledge base is displayed when that specific .html file is loaded and the customer options for that workspace has browse mode enabled. It sounds like you are looking for a specific directory or location that the knowledge base articles are stored in, however, the knowledge base does not work in that fashion. The knowledge base articles are basically the same as regular tickets in the workspace with a few extra flag set in the database to signify they are KB articles and not regular tickets. You may want to test adding this robot.txt file to the ../footprints/html directory, though I'm not sure if this is going to give the results you are expecting.