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Andrea Burattin edited this page Sep 5, 2017 · 2 revisions

Cheetah Experimental Platform Web (CEP-Web)

Installing CEP-Web on your local machine or your server

CEP-Web has been developed as a web application that can run on your local machine or your server. In order to run CEP-Web, a MySQL database and a tomcat server are required. Further, since CEP-Web is a created using Java, Java needs to be installed in version >= 7 (Java download: https://www.oracle.com).

Set up the database (MySQL)

CEP-Web requires an underlying database to work properly. It has been developed using MySQL 5.6 (http://www.mysql.com). Therefore, we recommend to install MySQL 5.6 to guarantee the best compatibility as follows.

  • Download MySQL server from http://www.mysql.com
  • Follow the installation instructions that came with your MySQL Download
  • Login to you MySQL server using the command line as follows or use a MySQL client, e.g., MySQL Workbench
mysql -uroot -p
  • Create a new database for CEP-Web:
create database cheetah_web charset utf8;
  • Create a user for CEP-Web. If you would like to change the database credentials, make sure to update the context.xml file in the war file.
grant all on cheetah_web.* to cheetah_web identified by 'cheetah_web_pass';

mysql -ucheetah_web -p cheetah_web < cheetah_web.sql

Set up Tomcat

I would like to extend CEP-Web

Yes! Go ahead :) In the following, we briefly describe how to get CEP-Web in your eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) workspace and how to launch the application to start developing.

Before you can start developing, please install tomcat6 and MySQL as described previously. You do not need to copy the war file and start tomcat6 as the server startup is then triggered via eclipse.

As mentioned earlier, CEP-Web was developed using eclipse. Therefore, we recommend that you download eclipse for EE developers (http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/). Next you should setup the tomcat server runtime environment in eclipse. This can be done in Window > Preferences > Server > Runtime Environments. Simply add a tomcat6 runtime environment and point it to your tomcat6 installation.

Eclipse comes with integrated git support that allows to clone this repository. Just point eclipse to the following URL: https://github.com/DTU-SE/cheetahweb.git and import all projects into your workspace. CEP-Web consists of two projects: org.cheetahplatform.web and org.cheetahplatform.web.migration. While org.cheetahplatform.web consists of all the source code of the application, org.cheetahplatform.web.migration contains everything for managing the underlying database. In order to keep database changes under control, we make use of liquibase, a database refactoring framework (cf. http://www.liquibase.org). This allows to specify all changes in an xml file (see org.cheetahplatform.web.migration/resources/changeLog.xml). The specified changes can be applied by running org.cheetahplatform.web.migration.LiquibaseMigrator.java.

Finally, the server configuration for tomcat6 has to be created. For this, open the Server view and click on the displayed link to create a new server configuration. After selecting tomcat6, click Next and add org.cheetahplatform.web to the server. After clicking on Finish, the server should be started and the application should be deployed. By navigating to http://localhost:8080/org.cheetahplatform.web/app/public/index.htm you can access the application.

A very brief introduction: Running CEP-Web

This guide provides a brief introduction on how to use CEP-Web. For more details we refer to XXX.

After logging in to CEP-Web using the web interface available at http://localhost:8080/org.cheetahplatform.web/app/public/index.htm one can start to upload and visualize data. For each subject, a video file and the corresponding pupillometric data should be provided. Subsequently, we provide a video and the export of the eye tracker of a process of process modeling instance of a subject in one of our studies.

After creating a new subject using the subject management, the user can upload the provided data and assign it to the subject.

After switching to the Visualize tab, the newly created user should be selected. If you are using the visualize feature for the first time for this subject, CEP-Web will need to prepare the data for analysis. Please select all files that should be prepared. After this is completed, the uploaded video and the corresponding pupillometric data is juxtaposed. Feel free to browse the data!

If you would like to clean your pupillometric data (as we would suggest), go to the My Data tab and select your pupillometric file. By running a series of cleaning algorithms, you can mitigate the influence of blinks and/or missing data. For details, we refer to XXXXX. By going back to the Visualize tab, you can inspect the cleaned data (once the cleaning is completed).

Supported eye trackers

CEP-Web was developed using the Tobii TX 300 eye tracker. The recorded data was exported using Tobii Studio to .tsv (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab-separated_values) files and .avi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave) files. Unfortunately, the .avi files exported by Tobii Studio cannot be streamed using a web browser. Therefore, the video files should be converted to a streamable video format. We made good experiences with WebM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM).

We would expect that the tooling should work well for Tobii eye trackers using Tobii Studio. For eye trackers of other manufacturers, we would expect a certain amount of adaptations in order to deal with their data format.

Tell me more!

We started providing more information regarding CEP-Web by writing technical reports. The first technical report focusing on cleaning pupillary data has been published here.

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