An art gallery

Executive Summary

This assignment is based upon an Art Gallery. Being the system analyst and designer the art gallery is hopeful I demonstrate professionalism and propose a computerized cataloging system which they require. Currently the Art Gallery has 8 exhibition rooms where they display art items from around the word. These items don’t only belong to the Art Gallery but by other owners, be it other galleries or private collectors. These items are borrowed to enhance the exhibition rooms which change exhibits every 3 months.

The gallery is lead by a curator and 6 assistant curators to see about its daily operations. One of the major issues of the art gallery is the paper based form which they use to keep record exhibits in storage or in exhibition, in addition and borrowing and returning of items to their respective owners.

There are several technologies available in which these paper forms can be transferred directly into the catalogue system which I am designing for the art gallery. These technologies would be reviewed and the best suited technology would be recommended for the transfer of the paper forms to the computerized system.

In building this catalogue it is required that only the curator and assistant curators have read, write, edit and delete functions once the system is properly installed. These functions would be given with discretion to the user according to rank i.e. the curator would be given access to the entire catalogue system granting him permissions to all CRUD functions whereas the 6 assistant curators would have specific access and could only delete certain items in the system. This is required for security issues.

In this proposal submitted must be a prototype interface so the users can see how the system would look before the interchange from the current paper based system to the computerized catalogue. The prototype would demonstrate the following functions:

Adding a new item
Editing item details
Searching for the location of an item
Listing items due for return

This system would make the curator and assistant curators demonstrate efficiency and effectiveness in the art gallery as it is a step into the modern way or storing data which is used by many businesses worldwide.

Unified Modelling Language, or UML, is a set of diagrammatic techniques, which are specifically tailored for object-oriented development, and which have become an industry standard for modelling object-oriented systems.

In developing this cataloguing system for the art gallery, specialized diagrams would be used to model the system throughout the development process. These diagrams would represent part of the system but not the whole thing. Some of the diagrams that would be shown are:

use case diagrams
use case specifications
activity diagrams
class diagrams
sequence diagrams
state machines
communication diagrams

Use Case Diagrams

Use case diagrams are description of the system from the user’s point of view. This would entail an actor, use case and system boundary. Three use case diagrams are presented to the art gallery to the show some functional requirements of the system but not the whole system. The art gallery system, maintaining the art list and returning the art item are demonstrated below.

This use case describes all the functions carried out in the art gallery system which includes all the actors from the curator, assistant curator, owner and the public. Some of the use cases include maintain art list, maintain owner list, maintain exhibition, manage store rooms, borrow and returning of art.

Maintain Art list is a function carried out by the curator. This use case was generated from the Art Gallery System use case in figure 1. It extends to describe the description of what the curator could do in the cataloguing system, which are CRUD functions.

Returning of art is a function which the assistant curator performs. This use case was developed from the Art Gallery System in Figure 1 and gives a details listing of the function the assistant curator can perform.

Use Case Specification

The use case description is a narrative description of the functional requirements from the use case. It describes the use case goal and gives the description of what usually happens and the normal course of events. Following are the use case specifications from the previous use case diagrams.

Use Case: Maintain Art List

Actors: Curator

Goal: Managing the entire art list

Description:

The curator logs into the system, the user name and password is verified. Access is granted and the curator continues to function. A search is carried out on a particular art ID to ensure it does not exist, once affirmed the curator may create the new record with all the art details required. Other functions granted to the curator are update, delete and print functions which follow along the same line. Once the curator is finished with the particular functions so desired he then logs out the system.

Use Case: Maintain Art List

Actors: Curator

Goal: Managing the entire art list

Overview:

Typical course of events:

Alternative courses:

Step 6 – the art information may already exist in the system in the event of adding a new art item and may choose a new art ID.

Use Case: Returning Art

Actor: Assistant Curator

Goal: To return art to respective owner

Description:

The assistant curator logs into the system, the user name and password is verified. A search is carried to verify all items that are due. The list is obtained and the assistant curator/s may contact the respective owner making them aware the due date is soon. The contract is ended for borrowing the art item, a report is printed and the art is returned. Once successful the assistant curator logs out.

Use Case: Returning Art

Actor: Assistant Curator

Goal: To return art to respective owner

Overview:

Typical course of events:

Description:

The art gallery system includes the daily operations of the art gallery; this includes the maintaining art list, owners list and exhibition carried out by the curator. The assistant curators also maintain the exhibition rooms, the storage rooms and carry out the functions of borrowing and returning the art items. The owner of the art items are also included in the borrowing and returning of the items and viewing the exhibitions in conjunction with the public.

Activity Diagrams

Activity diagrams show the internal flow of control in a process. Activity diagrams can be used to represent sequence, selection and iteration and they can also illustrate where all activities can be carried out in parallel.

According to IBM.com Activity diagrams are helpful in the following phases of a project:

Before starting a project, you can create activity diagrams to model the most important workflows.
During the requirements phase, you can create activity diagrams to illustrate the flow of events that the use cases describe.
During the analysis and design phases, you can use activity diagrams to help define the behaviour of operations.

This diagram shows the activity of events in swim lanes with the assistant curator, art list and the owner. It shows the process of the activity of events taking place in the returning process.

Class Diagrams

The class diagram is central to object-oriented analysis and design, it defines both the software architecture. It is used to model classes and the relationships between classes, and also to model higher-level structures comprising collections of classes grouped into packages. The class diagram appears through successive iterations at every stage in the development process.

Designed are class diagrams illustrating the super class, hierarchy and attributes and operations for the proposed catalogue system for the Art Gallery.

Transfer Methods

Currently the Art Gallery stores and processes all information on paper based forms which outlines the name, location, owner, value of art, due date, etc. This system could cause problems in finding location of art items and generating due dates because of the frequent change in the exhibitions and in storage.

The Art Gallery wishes to fully change this paper based style and produce a catalogue which would improve the efficiency and effectiveness in the work place that would entail the same information from the paper forms. The system would also grant permission to only the Curator and Assistant Curators to have read, write, edit and delete functions. In order to commence this catalogue all the paper forms must be transferred to the computerised system.

There are many techniques in which this catalogue could be created, but only the most efficient one would be chosen as it is critical to implement this system. These techniques range from human data entry, document scanning and even voice recognition tools. The mentioned techniques and technologies would be compared and contrasted where only the best option would be chosen to perform the functions needed.

Human Data Entry

Beginning with the very basic and most popular way of entering information into a system is human data entry. This operation is fully dependant on the data entry clerk or in the Art Gallery’s case the assistant curator to read the document and manually key information from the paper forms into the catalogue on the computer system.

This process would be strenuous and lengthy as it is a fully manual process. There are only six assistant curators employed at the Art Gallery and this would be highly impossible to implement in a short period. The curators not only have to borrow and return art items, but mange the store rooms and exhibitions so time would be limited in such, to perform data entry.

It is assumed that if this technique is chosen at least two of the assistant curators would perform the functions of keying the information into the system. Therefore this option is not best suited for the art gallery due to time constraint and the amount forms that would be re-processed even though a specific number of records wasn’t given, it is alleged that there are a profound amount of documents to be entered into the catalogue.

Advantages of Human Data Entry

Method requires simple software systems and low-end computing hardware
Less costly in the sense of hardware and software in addition depending on cost of manpower
A large number of PCs would be available for use after census

Disadvantages of Human Data Entry

Requires more staff
Time consuming compared to automated data entry
Human errors may consist
Standardisation of operations is difficult as performance may be individually dependant

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR)

According to tiscali.co.uk OMR is a technique that enables marks made in predetermined positions on a computer input form be detected optically and input to a computer.

Optical Mark Recognition is used to process data entry form in various institutes and companies. This technology shines a light beam onto the document and is able to detect the marks filled from check boxes and fill-in fields on a printed form, and then the software interprets the output from the scan and translates it to the desired format, bearing in mind the use of a keyboard is nonexistent.

OMR is best applicable for processing large number of hand filled forms which are needed to be processed quickly and accurately, which may include survey reply cards, questionnaires and ballots. The speed of OMR is very fast as it could process approximately 85-130 pages per minute and up to 4000 pages per hour depending on the type of machine used.

Advantages of Optical Mark Recognition

Improved data accuracy
Faster than human data entry
Capture speeds around 4000 forms per hour
Equipment is relatively inexpensive as costs are predictable and defined
It is simple to install and run
Well established technology that is used by many countries

Disadvantages of Optical Mark Recognition

There are restrictions as to form design
Restrictions on type of paper and ink
OMR cannot recognise hand written or machine printed characters
Images are not captured by scanners so electronic retrieval is not possible
Response boxes should be correctly marked with appropriate pen or pencil

The Art Gallery forms are hand written documents and OMR technology doesn’t recognise hand written documents therefore this technology is at fault with the requirements of the Art Gallery. Even though this technology has many advantages and of its use worldwide, another type of technology must be considered for transferring the paper based forms to the computerized system.

Optical Character Recognition

According to wisegeek.com Optical Character recognition is the process of converting printed or hand written materials into text or word processing files that can be easily stored and edited. All OCR systems require hardware and software for analysing the images. A scanners is used to scan the text on a page, then breaks the fonts into a series of dots called bitmap in addition it reads most common font and can determine where lines start and stop. The bitmap is then translated to computer text.

This technology fits the requirements of the Art Gallery as it is able to read hand written documents. There have been a lot of advances to this technology over the years as to improve the recognition of handwriting or fonts similar to hand writing. As we observed before in human data entry if we wanted to document one of the forms which is currently used by the Art Gallery someone would have to manually type the document word for word, but with OCR you just scan the document and it could be converted to several formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PDF or HTML.

OCR would save a lot of time as it is fast in reading documents, just scan a document and it would be ready in seconds. A lot of businesses have chosen this technology as it cuts time in producing a document which would usually take days to complete can now be accomplished in a minute.

Advantages of Optical Character Recognition

Quicker processing, up to 60 sheets per minute
Savings in costs and efficiencies by not having the paper questionnaires
Scanning and recognition allowed efficient management and planning for the rest of the processing workload
Reduced long term storage requirements, hard copy documentation could be destroyed after the initial scanning, recognition and repair
Quick retrieval for editing and reprocessing
Minimizes errors associated with physical handling of the questionnaires

Disadvantages of Optical Character Recognition

Higher costs of equipment
High calibre IT staff required to support the system
Handwriting on census forms be as close as possible to the model handwriting to avoid recognition error
Possibility for error during character substitution which would affect data quality
Tuning of recognition engine to accurately recognize characters is critical with trade-off between quality and cost

Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR)

Intelligent Character Recognition is sometimes compared with Optical Mark Recognition because of their similarities, but the difference with ICR is its advancement in recognition patterns allowing the technology to recognise all fonts and different styles of handwriting. This technology also allows automatic updates to the recognition of new hand writing patterns in its database.

This technology is best suited for the transferring of the forms in the Art Gallery because it would recognise the handwriting on the forms without any editing taking place. The process of documenting the forms to the computerised system would entail the form being scanned; the data is captured then analyzed and translated using ICR software that enables pattern-matching and automatic indexing. Just like OCR the data could be transferred into several formats such as Word, Excel, Access, PDF, XML etc.

According to managedoutsource.com some features and benefits of using ICR are:

Can recognize any text of a form or a check
Allows manual key boarding reduction or deletion
Maximum process automation of documents
Recognize text regardless of its specific typeface, style or size.
Batch processing
Automated updating, reports display and automated mass spectra interpretation
Automatic checking of the information against databases and dictionaries
Costs reduction for your business

Because of the similarity with ICR and OCR the advantages and disadvantages may be the same. Therefore the following disadvantages are reiterations of OCR disadvantages as described earlier.

Recommendation

Voice recognition technology is another aspect of converting the paper based forms to the computerized system but due to all the training involved in this technology only the fastest and most reliable techniques were discussed.

It is recommended that the museum use the Intelligent Character Recognition method for the transfer of the forms to the computerized system. Even though it is stated that the forms are easy to read and in standard English the Optical Character Recognition would have been the ideal choice, but doesn’t know what the future holds while the process is actually being implemented and what errors may occur.

One of the major downfalls the company would face with the ICR technology is its cost. This equipment quite costly and the budget of the Art Gallery are unknown. Instead of buying the machine it could be rented at a cheaper cost, because this technology is only being used to transfer the old forms and nothing further. This would result in a more economical status for the museum.

Another form is to buy the machine and rent it out to other businesses who demand the use of this technology for the same purpose. The income generated from the ICR machine could be used in the borrowing of the art items from other galleries and private collectors.

Prototype User Interface

According to agilemodeling.com a prototype user interface is an iterative technique where users are involved in the development of the User Interface for the system.

Since the actual system isn’t necessary to demonstrate to the users all desired are snapshots of the designed prototype interface. Includes are the searching for the location of an item, editing an item’s details, adding a new item and listing the due for return to their owners by a selected date.

In the searching process there are two options available to the user, by either entering the Art ID or browsing the current collection with the option of choosing the item type or by selecting the item. Once an option of choice is chosen the art details would be listed below. In the art item details there would be the name of the item what type of art it is, and its current location, further information could be granted to either see what exhibition room or store room it is located in.

This form is designed to add a new art item into the catalogue. It gives the option of entering all the art details into the form, once completed the curator has the option of going to another record and view all records in the catalogue or add another record in the system, once completed the curator could close the form.

This image is similar to adding the art information; the only difference is the editing aspect. The curator and assistant curators have specific functions where editing is concerned. First they search the record by browsing through the forms and choose the edit button to make changes to the art information. Once completed the new information is automatically saved then the user can close the form.

Generating due dates is a function which the assistant curator does in the returning of an art item process. The assistant curator has two options of searching for the due dates. Either by entering a desired date and then the catalogue would list all the due art items on that particular day or by entering an art id which would display the due date of the item. When the search is completed the assistant curator could then print out a report of the information gathered or close the form and continue with the returning art item process.

Security Issues

Security is a continuous process of protecting an object from unauthorized access. It is as a state of being or feeling protected from harm. That object in that state may be a person, an organization or property such as a computer system.

Many businesses suffer the loss of their business due to lack of security. Security doesn’t only have to be securing the computer system of the Art Gallery but also its physical surroundings. Objects in the art gallery can either be tangible or non-tangible, tangible objects being hardware and paintings, and intangible being information and data in the system that the art gallery depends on for its continuation. There Art Gallery has many art items which are on loan from different galleries and private collectors which may be priceless or one of a kind art work so losing this could cost the art gallery fortunes.

Physical Security

This may vary in different ways, if there is poor security measures such as little or no implementation of swipe cards, biometrics, security guards, surveillance cameras and identification cards, this may result in a negative effect on the company as there may be imposters wishing to harm the operations of the business. Businesses sometimes think if securing your computer with anti-virus and firewalls would help secure your business but the little things like an unauthorized person gaining access to the building and removing the server, stealing hardware or by vandalizing equipment could make businesses suffer continuity. Therefore the Art Gallery should have proper implementation security guards, surveillance cameras, swipe cards and other media to help with securing the exhibition rooms and store rooms in the Art Gallery.

Physical Attacks

Physical attacks may result in the event of malicious activity, natural disasters or it may be an accident these attacks results from denial of service. Listed are some physical attacks that may be harmful to the Art Gallery:

Fire – destruction of art and equipment
Water – flooding or leaks in the art gallery
Electrical Power Surges
Temperature – air condition failure
Natural Disasters – Hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Equipment Failure – failure in servers, surveillance cameras, swipe readers.
Tampering of equipment

With respect to the physical attacks once proper planning and prevention of the above mentioned are complied with the art gallery may be protected against any harmful measures.

Faulty Software

Faulty software may be unintentional mishaps, it doesn’t necessary means sabotage in a business but manufacture problems. These could occur if there is a glitch in the Operating System causing it to malfunction; software was misconfigured during installation or database software malfunction or exploitable weakness.

Malicious Software

Malicious software is software designed to destroy a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. Malicious software could be developed by hackers or internal employees in the workplace. Some malicious software may include

Computer Viruses
Worms
Trojan Horse
Logic Bomb
Hackers toolkit
Spyware
Dishonest adware
Crime ware

These malicious software can be contracted due to illegal use of the company internet for personal use other than work related or implanted into the system intentionally.

Unauthorised Access

Unauthorized Access may take form in different forms. A common way of unauthorized access is by leaving a system logged on and walking away from your desk, another co-worker may intentionally spy on your computer and steal information this is also called eavesdropping.

Counter authentication is another form of unauthorised access which may include individuals guessing passwords, password interception, password cracking and session replay.

Session Hijacking is the exploitation of a valid computer session to gain access to information or services in a computer system.

Denial of Service

Denial of service is designed to interrupt normal system functions and affect legitimate users to access the system. Hostile users send a flood of fake requests to a server making the connection impossible to establish. This may result in significant server downtime and financial loss for many companies.

All these mentioned security issues are threats to the art gallery; even though some attacks are based on a networked system it is assumed that the Art Gallery would implement a network for the computerised system.

Consequences to breach of security

According to the threats discussed earlier they play serious threats to the Art Gallery. Once the art gallery has a breach in security it could harm the continuity of the business depending on the level of attack. Firstly starting off with physical attacks, a natural disaster can destroy the entire building with all the exhibits and computers which could terminate the continuation of the business continuity. Other physical attacks like flooding and fire may harm the business but it could be prevented or stopped once proper implementation of fire extinguishers and proper storage of computer system and art exhibits a secured. The difference is a natural disaster is sometime unpredictable.

The loss of vital information pertaining to the catalogue with the owner details of art, and information could eventually result in physical theft of art items in the gallery. Some items in the art gallery may be priceless and belongs to persons all over the world; therefore loosing these items would endure the gallery into a financial disorder.

Art Gallery’s integrity and reputation could blemish as it would turn into a public scandal embarrassing they security measures and all private and confidential information exposed.

Permissions

User accounts are the best way of ensuring only the curator and assistant curators have write, edit and delete permissions in the proposed catalogue. Every user account is associated with a username and password, the users contact information, account restrictions allowing access to the database at only certain hours of the day and account status allowing the administrator to temporarily disable an account.

The curator would be the administrator of the database allowing him access to any and everything he desires which may include the maintaining the art list, maintaining owners list, maintaining the location of art items etc. These functions would allow the curator have all CRUD functions in the database.

Being the administrator no one can delete the account because the system depends on an administrator to function and administrator status could be granted to any a supervisor of the 6 assistant curators.

The assistant curators would be granted general access to the database but granted certain permissions. The supervisor of the assistant curators may have write, edit and delete functions, whereas the other users may have write and edit functions. Reasons being a delete function is one of power and this permission should only be granted to persons of stature in an organization. This is also part of security reasons.

Bibliography

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Websites

http://www.computer-realm.net/omr-technology/
http://www.drs.co.uk/census_methods.html.
http://search.pearson.com/compare/icr-ocr-omr.pdf
www.flatworldsolutions.com/articles/advantages-disadvantages-outsourcing.php
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8663036/Normalization
www.cert.org/archive/pdf/inside cross051105.pdf
http://www.omg.org/technology/uml/index.htm,

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