NCI

Overview: As part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has a mission to improve cancer-related research, training, and information dissemination. NCI is broken down into many centers, offices, branches, and divisions that focus on specific areas. Within the Office of Communications, the Communications Technology Branch (CTB) provides technology research, usability studies, and effective utilization of emerging technologies to support NCI's mission.

Challenge: As an information-based organization, NCI produces a vast amount of content daily. This includes research articles, booklets, and presentations. In many cases, knowledge is transferred through "live" events like conferences, round tables, and meetings whereby there is a foundation of content (i.e., of Power Point slides) that provides structure to the live event, but little means to capture and disseminate unstructured information (e.g., conversations, speeches, etc.).

Due to the expense of travel, publishing, and coordination of live events, CTB decided to research and pilot technologies that would enhance dissemination of information captured during live events with the hopes to reduce associated costs and increase knowledge transfer. In particular, NCI was interested in investigating technologies that could provide "synchronized" audio and slide capabilities that replicate a past event.

Solution: DDGlobal was chosen to implement a presentation capture and delivery solution for NCI due to our experience developing a delivery pilot for the NIH and our track record of delivering quality handheld solutions for NCI.

The effort involved the following tasks:

• Producing digital content, then implementing and hosting a delivery-only pilot system for the Center for Reducing Health Disparities' roundtable conference, "Reducing Health Disparities in High Cervical Cancer Mortality Regions" (RHDCC)
• Providing usage statistics and supporting usability testing on the pilot system
• Developing a delivery solution framework for enterprise-wide distribution
• Prototyping a capture tool to lesson production time and costs

Technical Solution:

Content digitization

For RHDCC, DDGlobal received a PowerPoint presentation, analog audiotapes, word transcripts, and videos from NCI. To produce a single, synchronized, Web-available presentation, DDGlobal performed the following:

• Converted analog audio to digital audio
• Manually time-stamped word transcripts with slide flips from Video
• Manually time-stamped, concatenate, and filter digital audio
• Produced RM, RP, and SMIL files
• Resized PowerPoint image files into thumbnails, magnified images, and player images
• Numbered player images
• Extracted text from PowerPoint

To help automate the production process, DDGlobal built tools for transcript time-stamping utility, PowerPoint text extraction, and image resizing and numbering.

Pilot Delivery System and Hosting

Once the RHDCC content was digitized, it was uploaded into the pilot delivery system. This system was built using IIS, ASP pages, and SQL Server. The features of the system included:

• Slide text search
• Audio transcript search
• Advanced search of metadata (e.g., author, date, etc.)
• Lecture abstract
• Presenter biography
• Real player delivery
• Slide enlargements
• Download of PDF or Powerpoint of presentation
• Download PDF of transcript
• Viewable transcripts by slide and presentation (supports section 508)
• Browser compatibility includes Netscape 4.6 and higher and Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher on Window platforms

To ensure seamless transition from development to production, DDGlobal provided hosting services for NCI. This involved setting up a production system, registering a domain, and monitoring and maintaining the system for a period of four months.

Usage and Usability Testing

Using WebTrends, DDGlobal provided NCI detailed usage reports on the RHDCC site to help evaluate the effectiveness of the system. Following the usage reports, NCI's usability team provided valuable improvements for the system and performed a formal usability study.

Delivery Solution Framework

Based on our findings from performance, flexibility, and functionality of the pilot system along with usage reports and usability results, DDGlobal's built an enterprise level solution framework for the delivery system. The framework was built using software development rigor based on the Rational Unified Process to ensure a solid, flexible platform for additional functionality and evolution. The design consisted of detailed use case diagrams, objects models, sequence diagrams, wireframes, database schema, and stored procedures.

Once design was complete, DDGlobal' distributed development team constructed the Web delivery system using the new architecture. Many of the core services for the new framework were reused from our library of services (e.g., database access, error handling, paging, and XML/XSL transformation objects).

Improvement	Value
.Net platform with ASPX and C# objects	Better performance and flexibility
Three-tiered architecture	More reusable and easier to maintain
XML/XSL layer	Easy branding without recoding
Client-side media player architecture	Enhanced performance and reduced storage requirements.

In addition to the functionality in the pilot system, DDGlobal built out new capabilities:

• Microsoft Media Player support
• Presentations organized by organizations and their conferences
• Synchronized transcripts
• Multiple presenter support
• Help page for plug-in downloads

With solid build and release management, the framework was tested for functionality, compatibility, and performance throughout the development process.

Capture Prototype

After reviewing the process and time spent digitizing each presentation, DDGlobal investigated technologies for automating the capture process. Based on this research, DDGlobal developed a Visual Basic capture prototype that provided the following:

• Interface to upload presenter and presentation metadata
• Real-time encoding to RealMedia or Microsoft Media formats during PowerPoint presentation
• On-line / Off-line capabilities
• Ability to migrate presentations to remote delivery server

Based on our initial findings, this prototype cuts sixteen hours of content digitization down to five minutes.

Outcome of Engagement

Immediately following the RHDCC pilot, various organizations at NCI were eager to deliver their online presentations. DDGlobal is currently working with NCI to analyze the first round of usability results. Following this analysis, DDGlobal will update the new framework based on these findings and prepare for new presentations that utilize the capture prototype for automatic production. All presentations will be migrated to the new delivery framework. Additional usability studies will focus on the capture prototype and new conferences will be added to the new delivery framework. Like the delivery system's evolution, the capture prototype will evolve to meet users needs.

Back to top