The 13th Annual General Assembly of the IAMU

Expanding Frontiers -

Challenges and Opportunities in Maritime Education and Training

Development and Algorithmic Analysis of Maritime Human Resource Database

Junzo Kamahara Associate Professor. Kobe University, kamahara@maritime.kobe-u.acjp

Mathew Rooks Associate Professm; Kobe University, rooks@maritime.kobe-u.acjp

Masao Furusho Professor. Kobe University, fi1rusho@maritime.kobe-u.ac jp

Abstract: Although IAMU was founded more than ten years ago, the information of IAMU member MET systems was still not detailed enough to carry out compari­sons of each MET system. Therefore, this project, which focused on creating an al­gorithm to collect valuable information regarding MET systems and human resource information of IAMU Member universities/institutions, was accepted as an IAMU Research Project in 2010-2011. The authors have developed the Maritime Human Resource Database (MHRD), which maintains the information of educational staff and faculty who belong to correspond ing member institutes of IAMU. Currently, 616 people in 45 universities/institutions have added their profiles into the database. Keywords: Maritime, Human Resource, Database, CakePHP

1. Introduction

Member universities/institutes of IAMU each have original Maritime Education and Training (MET) Systems which are regulated by the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) [1] via IMO and their own domestic restrictions. In particular, member institutes of IAMU not only have training courses for seafar­ers, but also advanced courses/functions of maritime-related research. However, the infonna­tion of the MET system in each institution was not shared with IAMU. Although IAMU was founded more than ten years ago, the infonnation of IAMU member MET systems was still not detailed enough to carry out comparisons of each MET system. Therefore, we proposed a research project to develop an algorithmic analysis via a maritime resource database which focused on creating an algorithm to collect valuable information regarding MET systems and human resource information ofIAMU Member universities/institutions. This proposal was ac­cepted as an IAMU Research Project in 2010-2011, and was jointly created with help from Odessa National Maritime Academy.

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Development and Algorithmic Analysis of Maritime Human Resource Database

Human resources may be indicative of individual institutions' academic ability for educa­tion and research. Furthern1ore, the faculties of institutions may have some relation with their graduates or career institutions/universities. Such human connections may show the mobility of maritime educators and researchers.

In the project, we focus on the professional aspects of maritime human resources and have developed the educator and researcher database for member institutions of IAMU. This data­base maintains the information of educational staff and faculty members who belong to cor­responding member institutes of IAMU. This information could be the same as the cmTiculum vitae. The information of maritime members is shared with other registrants via web-based Internet.

Our database has been created as a Web application using CakePHP [2], which is a rapid application development (RAD) framework. CakePHP is a very popular application framework and has various additional components that integrate new functions of web applications that are created by outside developers.

The problems of collecting personal data are centered around three points; 1) Initial start, 2) Privacy/Security and 3) Maintenance. Concerning the initial starting problems, the authors have a policy to register into the database voluntarily. We discuss these problems in section 4.

In the following section, we describe the details of the maritime human resource database. The implementation of our database is explained in section 3. We show the preliminary analysis in section 5 and conclude in section 6.

2. Maritime Human Resource Database

In this section, we explain the details of the Maritime Human Resource Database (MHRD). MHRD is web-based database which can be accessed via the Internet. MHRD was created using the CakePHP framework which can create web sites by rapid application development and operates by object-oriented programming. The data structure of the personal database is separated from the presentation on the web site. Therefore, the authors focused on the struc­ture of personal information and logic of collecting data. Because the implementation of our database is explained in section 3, we will describe the data structure of personal information in this section.

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2.1 Overview

MHRD should contain personal information specialized for maritime human re­sources. Therefore, the fields of database records should include maritime related information (ex. ship's officer license). MHRD has 5 tables: the user table, profile, paper table, image table and university table.

Kamahara, Rooks, Furusho

The profile table is centered with other tables (see Fig. 1).

I;mage Table,

Figure I. The relationship of database tables.

The user table is used for managing user account information. Registered users must have an account on the system to input and access information. The profile table is the main information of the user corresponding to the user table . The image table keeps the photographs of user portraits while the paper table records the citation in­formation of the papers which are written by the user. The university table maintains the pair with the ID and the name of university, and is used in the selection box of the profile edit page.

Currently, MHRD maintains only fundamental information concerning mari­time human resources . The profile table has a URL field which links to the external web page of the user. However, some users may have more web pages; for example, a Facebook page. MHRD may be able to add other tables for maintaining the ex­ternal web links connected with the profile table of the user. Such extensions may become available in future database updates, as MHRD is flexible enough to add new information.

In the next section, we will show more detailed table information.

2.2 Data Structure of Maritime Human Resource

We have designed 5 tables as follows:

(1.) User table:

Field Name Type Description

ID Number ID number of account

User name* String Account name used for logging

Email String Email address for sending confirmation mail

Password String Password string used for logging

Active Boolean Indicator of the account status

Moderator Boolean Indicator of special privilege to be able to modify other account

Created Date Created Date of the account

Modified Date Modified Date of the account

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Development and Algorithmic Analysis of Maritime Human Resource Database

(2.) Profile table:

Field Name Type Required'? Description

ID Number Automatic ID number of profile

User ID Number Automatic User account ID number

Full name* String Yes Full name of user (Family name, Name)

University ID Number Yes ID number of university where user belonged

Sub section* String No Sections of user's institution

Job title String Yes Academic Position of user

Tel String Yes Telephone number

Fax String No Fax telephone number

Languagel String Yes Primary language of user

Language2 String No Second languages of user

Careers* String Yes Academic Career of user (Last graduate)

Degree String Yes Academic Degree of user

License String No Mariner License

Specialties* String Yes Educational or research specialties of user

Associations String Yes Academic Societies or Associations

Interests* String Yes Research interests of user

Prizes String No Awarded prized of user

Under graduate Course* String No Teaching course in under graduate

Graduate Course* String No Teaching course in graduate school

URL String No External web resource of user

Created Date Automatic Create date of the profile

Modified Date Automatic Modified date of the profile

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Kamahara, Rooks, Furusho

(3.) Paper table:

Field Name Type Required? Description

ID Number Automatic ID number of paper

Profile ID Number Automatic IDnumber of profile linked with this paper

Names String Yes Authors' name

Title Shing Yes Title of paper

Publication String Yes Publication information

Year Number Yes Published year

Created Date Automatic Create date of the profile

Modified Date Automatic Modified date of the profile

(4.) Imagetable:

Field Name Type Required? Description

ID Number Automatic ID Number of image

Profile ID Number Automatic ID number of profile linked with this image

Contents Binary Yes Photograph image shown on the browser

Created Date Automatic Create date of this profile

Modified Date Automatic Modified date of this profile

(5.) University table:

Field Name Type Required? Description

ID Number Automatic ID number of university

Title String Yes Name of University/Institution

URL String No Internet Address of university (not used)

Region ID Number Yes Region ID(Asia/Europe/Central Emope/ America)

Order Ntm1ber Yes Registered Number of university

An asterisk next to a field name indicates that the field will appear in database searches. The only restriction of the search field derives from the 'String' type field. Users can select target search fields for the convenience of the searcher. Cmrently, detailed searches (filed specific search) are not enabled due to insufficient man­power. Only searches by university/institution are implemented and can be viewed after logging into the database.

47

Development and Algorithmic Analysis of Maritime Human Resource Database

2.3 Information Access

Users who are not logged in cannot see the contact information like telephone mun­ber, fax number and email address. Access by unlogged users sometimes turns out to be a web robot (automatic web crawling program) which collects all information on a web site for an Internet search engine (ex. Google). Therefore, if we do not protect the contact information from those who are not logged in, the information can be accessed easily by anyone who knows basic information (ex. Name) of registered members. We have to protect private user information from casual searches.

2.4 Policy of Personal Information

We need some personal information in order to collect maritime human resources. Therefore, we decided on a fundamental policy that personal infomlation should be entered by each individual user. We call this policy the 'Self Entry Policy.' This means that any operations or modifications of database records have to be done by the owner of personal information, with the exception of the database administrator. However, past experience with database operations suggest the necessity of moder­ated functions in order to modify the account information. Because some users did not receive the confirmation mail from the database or forgot the login password, he/ she needed to help to modify the account entry.

Another point of the policy is that information of registered users must be main­tained by each individual user. Managing personal information on one's own is im­portant to maintain the fidelity of the database by updating personal information in a timely manner. We plan to send notification e-mails for updating user information from the database periodically.

3. Application Development using CakePHP

Our database was developed using CakePHP. CakePHP is a very popular web application with an object-oriented framework. Such Object-oriented frameworks are the current fashion of pro­gramming that represents all information as "objects." In our case, the objects are 5 database tables which represent the personal information. CakePHP also adopts the MVC model. MVC stands for Model, View and Controller. The model is the object of application and essential data for application. The user needs to modify only the model to change the data. The view is the expression of the model; for example, web page design. Separating the web page view from the model can support the web page design easily without modifying the data of the model or con­troller programs. The controller is the program for operating the model via the view input. The controller should be implemented for realizing operational functions in computer programs. The components ofCakePHP are abstracted with the controller for specific functions. There are many components created by CakePHP users, and the implementer of the web application can select and use such components to add new functions on the web page.

Figure 2. Shows example profile of our database.

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C i t;) ':': o >.~i ./ .- mhrc.imerc.maritime.kol:e-u.ac .jp/:~" :i ::.: .;;,

Actions

Prntile

Id

User

I nstitution

Secti<Jn

Jobtitl~

Tel

Fax

Lan9uage1

t.,;:inguage.2.

careers:

Degr.ee

License

sµed:alities

Kobe !JlWl.ersity, Graduate Schoel of

A;:.:soc!ate: ?rofessor

·+·8178431 2f -09

+81. 78 4-31 2-509

English

osak.a u01versity

Muit:rned!-.::f Network

Academic Soc.it~ties or Assodatfons.

Figure 2. Example of Profile Page

3.1 Avoiding automatic account creation

Kamahara, Rooks, Furusho

· ······ ··· ·· ········ ······· ·· ··~·"

We have used the kcaptcha component which requires the user to enter a distorted string shown on the screen for recognizing that the user is a human being. An ex­ample of a distorted string is shown in Fig.3.

Figure3. Example of Distorted String.

49

Development and Algorithmic Analysis of Maritime Human Resource Database

This function prevents automatic account creation by web robots (program) be­cause the web robot cannot recognize such distorted strings by image analysis.

Furthermore, the database sends the activation email for self authentication when the user first registers with the database. The user must click to the link ad­dress in the email for self authentication. This method also can avoid automatic account creation.

4. Concerning Issues

In this section, we discuss some concerning issues that arose when we developed the database for collecting maritime human resources.

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4.1 Initial Start Problem

We adopted a 'Self Entry Policy' (SEP) for registering personal profiles. Therefore, the database needs individual users' instructions to enter a personal profile. How­ever, the people have less incentive to enter the personal data when there is little data in the database which may not be expected for use in searching for human resources. For this reason, we need to collect a minimum amount of data in the database for increasing future expectations of use.

We sent numerous emails, asking staff and faculty to register with the database, to the representatives of IAMU member universities/institutes. Furthermore, we promoted the database to some members oflMAU by visiting them directly. Due to these efforts, we now have 621 profiles for 45 universities/institutes (83.3%) in the database. The maximum number of registered users in one university is 82 people. The regional number of registered users is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Regional Number of registering.

Region Number

Asia 301

Europe 118

America 118

Africa/Central Europe 84

4.2 Security/Privacy

For the security/privacy of our users, we have instituted many security measures for adapting SEP, such as using the kcaptcha component and the view of non-logged in users . We also use secure connection (SSL) to access our database. SSL connections can be used for encrypted communication. When using SSL, we needed to buy an electrical certificate which is used on an Internet browser. We have used the VeriSign SSL certificate (CmTently, the name has changed to Symantec SSL certificate) . This can avoid wire tapping through the Internet by encryption, and protects the password

and other private information.

Kamahara, Rooks, Furusho

Furthermore, we have utilized activation emails with initial registered accounts to guarantee self-authentication in SEP. However, this scheme causes some account creation failures for various reasons, like incorrectly entered email addresses and activation messages that were not received. There are 994 accounts already created in the database, however only 735 accounts (73.9%) have been activated by email authentication. 259 people might have failed to activate their own account. Another 114 people were able to activate their accounts by email authentication, but they have not entered detailed profile information into the database yet. We need to send further promotional emails to activated accounts and remind users to enter detailed profile information.

4.3 Maintenance

Because we will continue to maintain this database in the future, we have some supervised functions to maintain the information of people. These functions can be used by the moderators who are specified by IAMU member universities/institu­tions. The moderator can create a new account for their faculty, activate their ac­count, modify the information of the account and delete wrong accounts (see Fig.4 ). However, the moderator cannot edit the profile information to protect the validity of personal information pertaining to the SEP.

~ Maritime Human Resource Database

!!flu

Actions Users

Id Pro fife Username Emaif Active Created Modified Actio ns

kmnatura kamc:ha :-a@p~cpie.kobe- 2on-01-os 2011- 12-00 u.ac.jp 10:32:18 13:45:23

Page L of 1, showing l :-econ:l's out c.f 1 ton!. star-.:ng vr: recvrd 1, endirig or: 1

Figure 4. Maintenance page of moderator:

We have requested new functions such as uploading CSV files to faculty profiles through a moderator of the university/institute. We are technically able to implement such functions; however, we have not yet implemented this request as it may violate our SEP. However, as users from vaiious institutes cannot enter their profile infor­mation by themselves , the information security policy of those institutes can be used as a backup policy. In that case, we need to consider defusing our SEP.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, we demonstrated the design and implementation of the maritime human resource database . We also discussed the operational issues of our database. We have developed our database as a Web application. Therefore, our database can evolve into a new communication

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Development and Algorithmic Analysis of Maritime Human Resource Database

tool among maritime people. The MHRD will continue to develop new functions as it estab­lishes itself as a major hub for connecting maritime education faculties. For future work, we will analyze the characteristics of organizational structures for each university/institution in our database. For example, there are 39 people (6.3%) who have indicated that they possess some type of mariner license. We hope such analysis will contribute to better communication and a more robust infonnation network for all IAMU members.

References

[ 1] http://www.imo.org/ About/Conventions/ListOfConventions/Pages/Intemational­Conventi on-on-Standards-of-Training,-Certification-and-Watchkeeping-for-Seafarers­(S TCW) .aspx

[2] http://cakephp.org/

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