[kepler-dev] Re: sampling

[Deana Pennington]

Edward A Lee wrote:

>
> Another question is, do you really want to do this?  I personally
> find it very annoying when I start a program, go get some coffee,
> and find that it stopped just after I left to ask me a question
> like "Are you sure you want to do this?"  As a result, it made
> no progress while I was gone...  I would use these sorts of dialogs
> very sparingly...
>
> Edward

The problem is that, in this case, the parameters depend on the data 
that are going to be used in the analysis.  In the simple case where 
some known data are going to be input directly to the sample actor, the 
parameters could be set in advance.  But if we are going to use the 
actor in a workflow where we query for data and integrate data from 
different sources, the user isn't going to know how to set the 
parameters until the first part of the workflow is done.  He may know 
that he wants a random sample, but he doesn't know what the available 
column names will be.  Which is why it would be nice to have the SMS 
system analyze the workflow and the data that are going to be ingested, 
figure out what the data will look like that will go into the sample 
actor, find all the parameters that require user input, and prompt the 
user to make those selections right off the bat...  Or better yet, 
rather than present the user with column names to choose from, present 
him with terms from an ontology/controlled vocabulary...

The only short term solutions that I see are:
1) set up actor parameters that require the user to know the column 
name(s) of interest in advance, and type them in
2) have a UI for each actor that reads the input data and prompts the 
user to select from available columns

Should probably allow for either (eg, if the parameters are set before 
runtime, then the prompt window should not appear).

Deana

>
>
>
>
> ------------
> Edward A. Lee, Professor
> 518 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
> phone: 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2739
> eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal
>

-- 
********

Deana D. Pennington, PhD
Long-term Ecological Research Network Office

UNM Biology Department
MSC03  2020
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM  87131-0001

505-272-7288 (office)
505 272-7080 (fax)