Minutes for 5/27/03 Meeting

Purpose:  Layout web site framework

                Discuss data base model

Participants: Jiang Wu

                    Kit Yu Choy

Web site discussion :

We look at the layout of CHGIS web site and decided to adopt some of the tags and ideas in this web site. Contents going to be added include Data Model, Data input and Funding sources.

Scope of project and relationship between data

Dr. Wu expressed interest in keeping scalability of the database to include different religions in different countries with a wide time span. Religions should be included are Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam. In addition, the five different branches under Buddhism should be included in database.

Then Dr. Wu introduced two kinds of masters: masters who only cut hair for their disciples and masters who will educate their disciples. However, the information of cut-hair master and location of hair cutting may be difficult to gather.

After that, issues regarding temples are discussed. The names of mountains where temples located did not change with time whereas the names of the temples did change. And there are public temples and private temples. Public temples recruit their Principals from elites among all monks. On the contrary, private temples recruit their principals among students of existing principals.

There are so many books written by monks. It should be nice to include their publications in the database as well.

Actions Items:

1.    Add more tags and items into current web page

2.    Add tables to current database to tackle issues of scalability. Come up a better way to handle problem of hierarchical number.

Next Meeting:

The next meeting is set for 6/2/03 at 10:30am.