ORNL Electronic Notebook

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ORNL Electronic Notebook Architecture
Al Geist Jens Schwidder David Jung Computer
Science Mathematics Division Oak Ridge National
Laboratory
Research sponsored by Mathematics, Information
and Computational Sciences Office U.S. Department
of Energy
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ORNL Electronic Notebook
Shared electronic notebook Accessible with
password through secure web site

• Advantages and Features
• ease of use, intuitive
• lookfeel of paper notebook
• access from any web browser
• no software to install
• can be shared across group
• or setup as personal notebook
• can run stand alone on laptop

Reading entries
Drag and drop notes from private to shared
notebooks
Annotation by remote colleagues

• Input from
• Keyboard
• Files
• Images
• voice
• Instruments
• sketchpad

Personal (stand alone) notebook
www.csm.ornl.gov/geist/
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ORNL Basic Notebook Functionality
Notebook Title
Page location
Modification buttons
Searching
Navigation buttons
Change history (pull down list)
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Features of ADD page

• Three input methods
• Text/HTML
• Quick sketch
• File/image upload

Author (required) Title (required) Keywords
Type or cut and paste text or HTML
Upload image and caption or PDF or MS Office file
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Many uses besides Compliant Notebooks
Existing Uses

• shared project notes
• proposal development
• meeting notes
• instrument logs
• centrally updated manuals
• (chemical) inventory
• distance learning
• teaching tool
• patient medical records
• medical research logs
• project tracking
• private notebooks

The technology lends itself to a broad set of
uses many of which dont require any special
compliance
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New Features in Version 1.12
User Requested Features
Subscription to sets of notebooks and daily
notification of changes if any Ability to print
hardcopy of all or set pages matching a search
General Improvements
Improved default search results Added addendums
to change history Allow display of XML and HTML
tags rather than execution
Evolution with Web Browsers
Extended Image upload types pjpeg, x-png,
etc. Removed old Java sketchpad
User Customizations
For example, PSC adding feature to generate
compliance page
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Customization thru Worksheet Templates
For certain experiments it is much more efficient
to present notebook users with a custom form
(worksheet) to record data.
Selective Image grab
Some data automatically inserted by the instrument
Template produced by Nestor Zaluzec for
the Materials Microscopy Collaboratory
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Customized for Instrument Controls
Template produced by Nestor Zaluzec Argonne Lab
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ORNL enote Security Modifications
New Features Add SSL encryption Access by PKI
certificates Ability to create notebooks remotely
and to set access policy Auditing access success
and failure
Modifications produced by Jim Rome of ORNL For
Materials Group. See enote cookbook for SW
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ORNL enote Security Modifications (cont)

• To wrap the ORNL V1.12 notebook in a PKI access
  scheme was quite simple
• About 4 lines of perl code are changed and
  created dynamically for each newly created
  notebook
• The Alliare JRun servlet engine is used to
  mediate all access and to output the notebook
  html code onto an encrypted (SSL) server.
• Auxiliary servlets are used to allow notebook
  management (creation, access control policy)

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Enote Used for Remote Collaboration
Instrument monitor and control panel Imbedded in
page
Courtesy of Michael Wright