One of the continuous activities of a faculty member, aside from teaching, research and service, is that of writing grant proposals. The grant proposers hope the project will be funded and it will lead to other funded grants. It’s a deep-thinking, intellectually stimulating, yet time-consuming process. I’ll save the grant writing process for another post. Anywho, here’s the story:
The set-up: It’s March 2013.
The Transportation Research Board (TRB) posts the grant solicitation: Freight Transportation Data Architecture: Data Element Dictionary.
- Grant Max Funding Amount: $500,000
- Grant Duration: 18 months
- Estimated Grant Start Date: 7/31/2013
- Proposal Due: April 19, 2013 at 4:30PM, 20 single-bound copies delivered to the TRB office
The story details: Fast forward a few weeks. I’m asked to scope the data management and data search tasks with collaborators: Transportation SMEs (subject-matter experts) Bruce C Hartman and Christopher Clott and Supply Chain SMEs Edie Schmidt and Regena Scott. I winded up serving as the project’s Principal Investigator.
A few weeks passed and over 10K words later, we had a complete grant proposal about improving the data model for the U.S. government transportation industry.
It’s April 18, 2013 at 12:00PM.
The Purdue pre-award sponsored programs office created the 20 bound copies. A complete grant proposal has a number of elements, including project plan, references, research biographies and letters of support, and makes it quite lengthy. So 20 bound copies were divided and placed in two boxes. These boxes were sent from the Purdue pre-award sponsored office to the TRB.
The punch-line: The boxes left the office together, arrived at the Washington D.C. shipping facility at the same time, yet were separated, to then be delivered to the same final destination on the same day. One box arrived at TRB on 4/19/2013 at 10:30AM. The other box arrived at TRB on 4/19/2013 at 4:43PM. The second box was 13 minutes late. The grant proposal was not even reviewed. The shipping and delivery company failed my colleagues and me. So hilarious that it is not. I mean, why did the TRB even want paper copies anyways? Digital versions would have been so much cheaper!
Here is an excerpt from our introduction. (Hopefully, at least someone will read our work.)
Effective decision making in the freight transportation industry is severely limited by the disparate definitions used by the wide range of data sources – federal, state, regional sources as well as private and public. The objective of this research is to remedy this problem by producing a searchable and sustainable web-based freight data element dictionary for transportation analysis. A standardized approach that is used throughout the nation will significantly improve the transferability of freight information at any scale – ranging from a single cargo box to an entire train bed.
Our multidisciplinary team of researchers from Purdue University and the University of St. Francis (USF) is proposing to develop a searchable, web-based data dictionary of elements suitable for the National Freight Database Architecture. This feature will allow users to find data elements relevant to taxonomy elements and see details about them. Other search criteria will also be developed and use cases will also be presented. An additional outcome of our work will be a comprehensive report detailing the data sources studied and recommended, the taxonomy defined, the entities documented, and the hierarchical layout of the data elements, and functional relationships between data from different sources. Finally, our research team will produce a technical paper and conference presentation, with the goal of explaining the scope of the project and providing an overview of the data dictionary.
No comments:
Post a Comment