Hello!
The MIIDI Input Form permits you to create structured metadata about a research investigation, its component studies, and
one or more of its scholarly outputs, e.g. a journal article and a related dataset. Documentation about the underlying MIIDI
data model is available at http://www.miidi.org.
Summary of possible actions (explained in more detail below)
- Enter data into a blank MIIDI Input Form to create a new MIIDI Report.
- Save a template after entering your personal metadata in the Provenance tab.
- Open a template or an existing MIIDI Report, either complete or partially completed, using the ‘Open’ tab to select a report
from your file system and load it into the MIIDI Input Form, overwriting an data already in the form.
- Save your complete or partially completed MIIDI Report as an XML file on your local hard drive with a filename of your choice.
- Rescue the content of your partially completed MIIDI Report as a block of XML text, that can then be pasted into a text editor
and saved as a .xml file, in the event that your session times out.
- View your MIIDI Report as HTML in a new browser window, or download it as an HTML file.
- Save your MIIDI Report in Kipling XML format, for loading into Annotum.
- [Coming: Save your MIIDI Report in JSON or one of several RDF formats.]
- Re-set the MIIDI Input Form – this will result in loss of any existing data.
Creating a template
If, after entering your personal information for the first time, you save the MIIDI Report as a template report, you will
be able to re-use this template each time you wish to start a new report, avoiding the chore of having to enter your personal
information each time. See the Provenance tab for details.
Saving your MIIDI Report
You may save your template, or your partially completed MIIDI Report, as an XML file to your local hard drive at any time,
and return to finish it later. The exact behaviour upon clicking the ‘Save’ tab will depend on your browser setting – either
the MIIDI report will be saved to your default directory (e.g. My Downloads) or a dialog box will open, giving you the opportunity
to navigate to a directory of your choice. (To change this in FireFox, alter your settings in Preferences / General / Downloads).
It is good practice to save your MIIDI Report after completing each section. Note that your session on the MIIDI server will
time out after 30 minutes of inactivity, preventing you from continuing to use the input form. It is therefore important that
you ALWAYS save your MIIDI report before leaving your session unattended. Then, even if your session times out, you will be
able to load your saved incomplete report into a new blank MIIDI Input Form and continue where you left off.
If you have failed to do this, and find yourself unable to continue because of a time-out, you can still rescue the content
of your partially completed MIIDI Report. On the Save tab, click the "To display the report in a text box please click here"
link, then manually cut the entire text out of the text box that opens, past it into a text editor, and save as MyMIIDIReport.xml.
You will then be able to open this file in a new blank MIIDI Input Form, as described above.
Specifying a file name
It is important that you specify the required filename in the MIIDI Form Save tab, before clicking the ‘Save as XML’ button,
rather than subsequently in your browser’s ‘Save’ dialog box, so that the MIIDI system as well as your browser knows what
the filename is. Subsequent ‘saves’ will then use the same filename and directory, unless you specify otherwise.
Loading a template or an incomplete MIIDI Report
To load a template, or to reload an existing XML MIDDI Report for completion or correction, click the ‘Load’ tab, use the
Browse button to locate your locally saved report, then click the ‘Load’ button to load the saved XML file into the MIIDI
Input Form in a browser window. Note that any existing data in the MIIDI Input Form will be over-written by this action.
Entering metadata
If the information requested for certain metadata fields is not available or is not relevant, please leave those fields blank.
Validating your MIIDI Report
You may validate your MIIDI Report after clicking the Validate tab. Validation checks the XML report for required information,
e.g. a valid MIIDI Report creation date, and displays a list of any omissions or errors to guide you in correcting them.
Any incomplete data field will generate an error, but you may ignore these errors if you are not using that section of the
report (e.g. Vaccination Date). Your report can be saved normally even if it has not passed the validation test.
Downloading your MIIDI Report in other formats
As well as being able to save your report as an XML file, you can view it as an HTML page in a Web browser window, or download
it as an HTML file. To do this, click the 'html" link on the Save tab page.
To permit a MIIDI report to be published to the Web using Annotum (http://annotum.org/), a scholarly authoring and publishing
platform based on WordPress, download the report as Kipling XML by clicking the "Kipling XML" link on the Save tab page. Annotum XML is based on the
Kipling subset of the JATS, and will validate via the PMC XML Validator (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/utils/validate/xmlcheck.cgi). JATS is the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Journal
Article Tag Suite, aka the Journal Publishing DTD 3.0.
At a later date, the ability to save the report in JSON and various RDF serializations will be added - this requires some
ontology mapping that is currently being undertaken.