Almost a year ago being in Seoul I was thinking about visiting say the Far East Federal University with a seminar. Trying to find any information on their official website about people working on HEP I realized, how a complicated task it is. Almost all webpages of institutions contain very fragmented, insufficient, outdated or even wrong information on the subject, that makes it very hard to understand who is working at which institute and what are his/her research interests. Precisely to overcome this problem I started developing a website, storing a database for all HEP-people.
The database hepthwiki.org is made in the form of a wiki-project with the semantic mediawiki addon. This allows to connect all pages into a semantic database of nodes, where each node has certain properties. For example, each person has properties of affiliation, and each institute page shows only people with the corresponding semantic property in the staff section. This makes it very easy to change affiliations or research interests of any person without the need of changing the information on each of relevant pages.
Currently the project includes only scientists from Russia with further extension to Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. This is because webpages of Western (in the wider sense) universities are in a better condition and has more information. However, since all above also applies to them to some extent, it is planned to widen the database to the whole globe. If anyone wants to put effort on this, just let me know.
Since this is a wiki-project it is supposed to be contributed by the community. For that one may use links on the side-bar of the wiki, that follow to google-forms. The results are sent to email and are added to the wiki by hands. Alternatively, one can ask me for an account and edit the wiki directly.
Currently there are not so many people listed on the wiki, for which there are certain reasons. Firstly, it is much more boring to add information than writing the code. Second, each page consumes certain amount of time to find the relevant information in the web. That was actually among the reasons to start this project. Hence, I welcome anyone to participate at any level from simply adding information to helping with the code or sharing any ideas on how to improve the site.
Another nice feature this site has is the Conferences page that lists conferences on HEP, held in Russia or by Russian universities. These include both international and local events. So all those interested in visiting Russia at your institute's expense are invited.
I find it necessary to mention the projects wikidot.com and wiki.wiki which helped a lot at the early stages. During the work on the wiki math-phys.wikidot.com based on the Polish wikidot, that is an old mediawiki engine with some addons and its own syntax, I realized the need of semantics. And the website mathphys.wiki gave some basic impression on how mediawiki and semantic mediawiki work and what extra plugins I need. Finally, after the tech support of wiki.wiki had stopped answering emails, I decided just to use the mediawiki engine and to upload it on a server.
Here I would like to thank all those, who helped me in this project: Ilya Bakhmatov, Ilmar Gahramanov and my wife Evgeniya Romanenkova who went through the alpha's and beta's of the page and gave a lot of useful advice on how to improve it. Special thanks to Fedor Makarov, who provided hosting on his servers.
I am sure this website will be useful to both Russian researchers and our colleagues from abroad.
