Cornell University - CHESS Application Planning

The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) is a high-intensity X-ray laboratory supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, and others. CHESS provides on-campus users and its many visiting investigators state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation facilities for research in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Materials Sciences. A special NIH Research Resource, called MacCHESS, supports special facilities for protein crystallographic studies. Each year, 500-600 scientist teams, plus graduate and undergraduate students visit CHESS to conduct experiments and collect data.

Management and Scheduling information in the current CHESS operation depends substantially on software and computer processes developed early in the emergence of Internet-driven database technology. As an example, some data are contained in an MS Access data system which by today's standard lacks scalability and integration potential. Continued smooth operation, growth, and the need to meet emerging reporting standards imply the replacement and upgrading of the overall Application.

Planning and Software Consulting Example

There is the implication in the diagram that the Contact Database is a product integrated with CAM. This could be just tables in the CAM DB, or an Open Source Application DB separate from the CAM DB, or an integration with the University's Outlook DB and system.

GORGES led several months of Application Planning, including a Discovery Phase, Application Modeling Phase, and Software Selection Phase. Continuing, current work has selected Tableau as the system's reporting software. Other functionalities such as the three Managers, see diagram, will be treated similarly, searching first for broadly available software, then setting an integration plan, and finally adding custom scripts to effect the integration into a very extensible and economic whole.