The AGHOST Reporting Database, AKA Project October, has been the most complex and resource intensive of all of our technical projects for 2006. Written entirely by AGHOST Technical Director Steve Zarkos, the software required many months to design, build and roll out to AGHOST researchers in the field. The AGHOST Reporting Database consists of a web-based interface for case management, client relations and investigative reporting. Using this software, AGHOST investigators are able to complete their reports online and AGHOST team leads are able to manage cases, manage investigators and present the client with a well-organized and consistent final report. All data is stored in a backend database for easy querying and searching. In the short term this software will make reporting and case management a lot easier for our researchers, and in the long term will provide an invaluable resource of investigation data that can be queried and sorted for useful statistical information and trend analysis. The AGHOST Reporting Database was built using entirely free software tools, including PHP, PERL, Apache and MySQL. Please send all questions or comments to the Technical Director.

The AGHOST Reporting Software is case oriented. That is, case managers can create cases, to which all investigators and their reports are linked. Each case, then, represents a single investigation or walkthrough. After a case is created the case manager may then add investigators to the case. Once added to a case, each investigator is then able complete and publish a report documenting their findings after the investigation. And finally, once the report is published other investigators are then able to read and review the report. In designing and building the software, a fair amount of thought was put into creating a simple, yet functional user interface. Simple tasks such as publishing a report, or slighly more complex tasks such as listing all the cases and reports for a particular user, can be accomplished with just a couple clicks. By integrating the AGHOST Reporting Database with our Space Weather Archive developed earlier this year by AGHOST, we are also able to automatically pull space weather and moon phase data into the report on the fly. This data can now be automatically linked to the report, so that investigators are no longer required to manually obtain this information before or after the investigation. The AGHOST Reporting Database is available to all AGHOST and AGHOSTOnline members.

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