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The publicity responsibility of the IAPR PC Committee is primarily the design and maintenance of the IAPR website. The publications responsibility is mainly handled by the editors-in-chief of three IAPR sponsored journals: Pattern Recognition Letters, Machine Vision and Applications and the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition. Each editor makes an annual report about their respective journal to the committee chair which is then presented to the IAPR Executive Committee. In this article we will report on the new IAPR website.
Over the past year many updates have been made to the IAPR website (www.iapr.org). The web server has grown to contain nearly 250 MB of data and the overall appearance and organization of the public website has changed dramatically. Updates are continually being processed as requested by the officers and members of the IAPR community.
Website Host
Early this year the entire IAPR website was moved from its old home in Prague, where it was maintained for many years as a service to IAPR by Michal Haindl, to the United States. The main website is now served from the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The website was transferred between servers over the period of November 2004 to January 2005, during which time content was updated and formatted to fit a new visual design. The public site was merged with the IAPR members' site already hosted by CEDAR, and updates were made to menu listings and page organization. Updates to information and functionality continue to be made frequently in order to evolve the website into a useful and informative tool for the IAPR community. |
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INSIDE the IAPR |
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Members Only Section
The intent of the IAPR public website and member’s area is to consolidate general interest information and to maintain links to other more specialized websites, such as member societies and IAPR technical committees. The website contains information describing many aspects of the organization, including conference dates, committee and member listings, sponsored awards and application information. Executive Committee and Governing Board Archives are also available to members of the appropriate groups. The IAPR Member’s section, once separately hosted by CEDAR, has been combined with the main IAPR website. The IAPR member’s area was implemented in order to provide a location where society members could access information that would not be made readily available to the general public. The membership database currently contains 360 individuals in 34 member societies from around the world. Currently the IAPR Member’s website provides several services to members including an IAPR news and announcements section that is used to list upcoming events or other pertinent information for IAPR members. The IAPR sponsored publications section allows members access to relevant periodicals, including the IAPR Newsletter, in html and PDF formats. The published resource database has grown to encompass fifteen conferences catalogued by IEEE Computer Society, including ICDAR, ICIAP, ICPR and IWFHR conferences since 1995, and contains over 250,000 entries indexing thousands of papers. To register, members can enter an email address and password at the main website. They can optionally include name, membership number and society. |
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Future Plans
In the future, interfaces will be designed to allow designated members to make their own updates to web page content. Web hosting companies have been contacted and a solution is being selected. The primary improvements for the IAPR website have been identified as: ¨ a need to have the IAPR website hosted at a location accessible to changing leadership, ¨ an administrative interface which will allow designated IAPR members to update and maintain specific sections of the website, and ¨ a design which will convey IAPR's status as a global organization with widespread technical interests. Each company has been asked to provide a detailed report describing their solution. These specifications are currently being reviewed. |
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IAPR Publicity and Publications (PPC) Committee: The New IAPR Website
Sargur Srihari and Edward Sobczak |
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IAPR Home Page |
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IAPR Member’s Page |