User:Mallory-udubstep

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WriteAPrisoner.com is a social website, whose main goal is to promote positive change for current inmates in prisoners all over the nation. This website's main goal is to reduce recidivism and raise awareness among the community. WriteAPrisoner.com provides opportunities for the public to communicate with current inmates, by having inmates publish personal profiles on the website. WriteAPrisoner.com also provides resources for inmates in the areas of education, housing, careers, etc.

Information Infrastructure

Info Model

Info Types and their Relationships

Inmate

The primary type on WriteAPrisoner.com would be the inmates themselves, because they are the individuals that provide the basis for other types to exist and be related to. Prisoners have individual profiles in which they can provide personal information, a short biography, photos, legal information, etc. Prisoners on WriteAPrisoner.com (a social website) make profiles of themselves so they can access all the features that WriteAPrisoner.com has to offer.

Type Inmate

Artwork

Another info type that is on WriteAPrisoner.com is the artwork that the prisoners can upload. The info type is the artwork uploaded and each info item is a different piece of artwork uploaded by a prisoner. Each piece of artwork has attributes such as artist, date uploaded, size, etc. For each piece of artwork, the values are different making each piece of artwork an info item.

Blog

The blogs that the prisoners can post on are an information type. The blog post is linked to an inmate, which is another type. For each blog there are attributes for the date, the category the blog is about, and basic information about the inmate.

Organizational Structures

Hierarchy

In this photo, we can see a drop down menu leading to various options, and under those options are even more options to select. In the computer world, this kind of organizational structure is called a “hierarchy”, and is similar to a table of contents. Each tab in the menu bar drops down to lead to more options, and those options lead to even more options. We can think of this hierarchy as a “mother and child” relationship. We can consider the “Inmate Profiles” tab the mother, under which is the “Inmate Alphabetical Listing of Profiles” tab (the child), under which is the “(Text Only Version)” tab (child of the child). In moving down the hierarchy of options under the original tab, we are getting more and more specific to the type of information that we are in search of.

In this hierarchy, the types are each tab in the menu tab. Each tab is an information item, and under each of those items in the drop down menu are all of its attributes. Finally, under those attributes, are its values. The user interface is very user-friendly for this specific hierarchy. The user simply needs to mouse over each tab to reveal the next level of the hierarchy, as opposed to being redirected to a new page. This hierarchy has a simple user interface, thus increasing the number of users who feel comfortable using the system.

Sequence

The largest and most prominent sequence on WriteAPrisoner.com is located on the home page. There is a short sequence of inmate profiles that is front and center on the homepage. It is a sequence because the profiles are all listed in a row in order from newest to oldest. They put this sequence here so that users are able to quickly find the most recently updated profiles easily. A sequence is the best organizational structure for this situation because it is the first thing people see and it makes it easy for them to find inmate profiles that are recent and relevant.

Another sequence would be the Prison Slang section. All of the slang terms are organized alphabetically and there is a quick navigation bar at the top to speed up the process of finding the word you are looking for. The words are arranged in a sequence, like a dictionary, because most times the user knows what they are looking for but the only thing they know about it is the spelling of the word.

Functions

Inmate Locator

Being that WriteAPrisoner.com is a social website for providing profiles of thousands of inmates from all over the country, it is only natural that there be a feature to help locate specific profiles. This feature is named “Inmate Locator”. The Inmate Locator uses various filters to narrow your search of inmates. The basic search uses qualities such as age range, sexuality, location, ethnicity, etc. to find an inmate to connect with. The advanced search includes additional qualities such as eye color, hair color, poetry, blogs, incarceration date, etc. In addition to these two types of searches, the user can also browse profiles by most recently updated, most recently created, age, or random.

The user interface for the inmate locator feature consists of 2 different tabs for searching, one is basic search and the other is advanced search. In Basic Search, there are drop down menus showing all the possible values for each attribute of the search. For example, when searching by location, a drop down menu displays all 50 states, Africa, Zambia, and Thailand for the user to select from. In Advanced Search, the same drop down menus exist, with the addition of text boxes for the user to type in the first and last name of the inmate. The user can also select bubbles to fill in (similar to saying if the quality is true or false) to filter their search further, such as if the inmate profile has artwork, a blog, poetry, etc. on their profile.

The basic idea of the algorithm behind the inmate locator is that of most social searches. When a user searches for an inmate, they are actually searching an information database. WriteAPrisoner.com most likely uses a database with many different tables, filled with information items, attributes, and values which correspond to inmates, qualities/characteristic types, and qualities/characteristics of that specific inmate. When a user selects filters to specify their search results and clicks the "search" button, the client website queries the server, the server retrieves the information queried by means of SQL (Structured Query Language), delivers the retrieved information to the client, and the client then displays the information in the presentation tier (in the form of the user interface). For example, on WriteAPrisoner.com, the client would query the server for inmates with brown hair, incarcerated in 2008,and from the state of California. This query would tap into the database and find all rows (items) with columns (attributes) that match those descriptions, and that information would be displayed on your computer screen within milliseconds. WriteAPrisoner.com most likely has a thin client and a large server, because most of the action goes on in the processing and data tiers (located in the server) when a user searches for an inmate, and the presentation tier simply displays the final result of all the work being done in the two "behind the scenes" tiers.

The inmate locator showcases a variety of organizational structures and information types. An index can be seen in the links to the results pages, because the results page numbers are in numerical order and each page number is linked to a results page. This function also shows the idea of links. On the results page, after clicking on an inmate’s name (in blue text), the user is directed to that inmate’s profile. This function also displays a sequence, after searching by filters such as “newest profiles” or “most recently updated”, it displays the profiles in a sequential order based on date of publication or date of last update.

Edit Inmate Profile

With the function if editing an inmates profile, you can change all aspects of the inmate profile. This includes name, facility, age, and everything of the sort. This function is a paid function and the cost varies based on the different edits that you make. The user interface is fairly simple. It gives you attributes such as name and facility, and then next to each attribute is a text box in which you can fill in or edit the value. What this does in the processing tier is it organizes the data into a table. This table organizes the information by attribute and value so that each column is an attribute and each row is a different info item (inmate profile). The website then displays this information in a organized fashion to create the inmate profile.

Games

After clicking on the Games for Inmates link on the main page, the user is directed towards a Fun For Inmates! welcome page that lets the user choose to create one of three types of puzzles: Word Search, Number Puzzles, and Number Search.

Upon clicking the Word Search and Number Search puzzles, the user is directed to a page where they can customize the difficulty of the game with criteria such as: in what direction the answers can appear, what words are used (in the case of the Word Search) and how long the searched for numbers are (in the case of the Number Search).

All three of the puzzle games have an option to print them off or to download a PDF of the puzzle and a randomize button to reset the puzzle with another randomly generated one that fits the requirements.