How to register to NDA Portal.com

How to register

Registering to NDAPortal.com is very easy and it consists of only 3 steps.

Before starting your user registration, however, it's good to remind you that user registration on NDAPortal.com is slightly different from what other websites or portals do. The main differences are 2:

1. Users have to be authorized by an administrator
2. Users have different "roles" or "privileges"

To better explain the first point, NDAPortal.com has chosen this policy mainly because of security reasons. This approach gives the administrator the chance to avoid spam, registration abuse and keeps the site clean of unwanted contents.

Note also that users on NDAPortal.com are not all the same. Every user has a "role" within the website, depending on the type of contribution that he/she is willing to give. For example there are authors that want to contribute with articles but not to applications or want to focus more on the handbook or on all of them. This stategy keeps the role of the single user very clear and permits a better control over the content creation process. Further details are given in the "How to apply for an author role" page.

User Registration - Step 1

The first step is to go to the home page and click on the "create new account" link, in the login window,

This link will bring you to the main form for user registration.

User Registration - Step 2

The second step is to fill out the fields of the following form. Take care that the fiels marked with a red asterisk are required!

User Registration - Step 3

Once you have filled the required and/or optional field of the form, you should read the terms and conditions of use for this site and, if you agree, click on the "Create new account" button.

After you have clicked on the "Create new account" button, a confirmation email will be sent to the email address that you specified in the form. In this email you'll find your temporary password. You will be able to change your password once one of the administrators will approve your subscription.

If you don't receive the confirmation email within 1 hour, then please contact the site administator through the contact form, or by writing at the address admin@ndaportal.com.

How to apply for an author role

The users on NDA* Portal.com have different "roles". Each role gives to the user different content creation features. Not all the users, in fact, can create all the possible content types available on NDA* Portal.com.

Each user is part of one or more "role". The defined roles on NDA* Portal.com are:

• anonymous
• Authenticated user
• Article Author
• Application Author
• Book Author
• Glossary Author
• Administrator

Applying for one or more of these roles is free and easy.

1. Each registered (authenticated) user can go to http://www.ndaportal.com/contact
2. On this form, the "Apply for an author role" option of the "Category" selection box should be activated.
3. In the "Message" field specify the role you want to apply for.
4. Send the message filling out the other required fields of the form (marked with a red asterisk).
5. An administrator will send you an email confirming the upgrade of your user profile.
6. To create new contents, you can go to your navigation block (right sidebar) and click on the "Create Content" link.

If you have problems with the role application or for any further info on roles, please contact us with http://www.ndaportal.com/contact.

Publication procedure

To publish contents on NDAPortal.com, every author should follow a publication procedure. 

After a registered user has been granted an author role (see how to apply for an author role), he/she can start to build his/her own content. The new content will follow a publishing workflow, starting from the "draft" state up to "published". There are 4 possible states of the content are:

1. DRAFT: when the content is in this state, it is NOT published, nor made available for comments except to the author. Only the author can access it to allow for incremental editing, personal review and modification. When the author has finished writing the content and thinks that it should be ready for submission, then it can switch to the state "REVIEW".
2. REVIEW: in this state the content is requested to be under review. All the contents must pass the review, which will check that there is no spam, no offensive or otherwise forbidden content. The review process will not deal with the specific topics of the content, but simply check and correct the form used to present it. This review process is done by an administrator that, when finished, will switch the content to two possible states: "PUBLISHED" or "REWORK".
3. PUBLISHED: At the end of the review state, if the administrator considers the content ready for publishing, then the content is switched to the  "PUBLISHED" state. Then, the content will be visible on the front page and in the categories to which it belongs (Handbook, articles, etc.)
4. REWORK: In the case that, at the end of the review process, the administrator thinks that the content needs some rework from the author side (for example due to some figure or graph) the content is switched to this state and action is required from the author. When the author has finished the corrections, then the content can be switched to the review state to ask for a second check before publishing.

In order to publish you can choose between two content creation methods. To get a detailed description of these methods, click on the following links.

How to enter mathematical formulas

Since NDA* Portal.com is meant to hold and display scientific content, which usually includes mathematical formulas, here we describe how to enter good looking expressions that can be displayed on your browser. To make this possible, NDA* Portal.com uses the advanced Math features of MathML*, Math Meta Language, which is nowdays supported by many browsers. To have more details on what is MathML*, you can go to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website at the page on MathML or visit the Mozilla website on MathML* support here.

The capability to write formulas in NDA* Portal.com is made possible thanks to the ASCIIMathML JavaScript, written by prof. Peter Jipsen. More details can be found here or in the author's website.

However, to start using formulas, your browser should satisfy some requirements.

Requirements

For Internet Explorer version 6 and above:

• To have MathML* work on your IE installation, you have to download the free MathML Player plugin, which installs the necessary extensions and fonts to render math formulas correctly.
• Once you have installed the plugin, just restart your browser and you'll be able to see formulas.

For Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape 7.1:

• These browsers support MathML* natively, in contrast to IE which needs an external plugin. However to better support the display (rendering) of mathematical formulas some additional fonts are required.
• To download the necessary fonts you can go to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/ where you will find all the necessary informations.
• You should not need to restart your browser, but it can help to do so.

At the moment we don't have any feedback about other browsers. If you have another browser or useful information on this topic, please contact us to admin@ndaportal.com.

Examples

Example: Solving the quadratic equation.
Suppose $ax^2+bx+c=0$ and $a!=0$. We first
divide by $a$ to get $x^2+b/ax+c/a=0$.

Then we complete the square and obtain $x^2+b/ax+(b/(2a))^2-(b/(2a))^2+c/a=0$.
The first three terms factor to give $(x+b/(2a))^2=(b^2)/(4a^2)-c/a$.
Now we take square roots on both sides and get $x+b/(2a)=+-sqrt((b^2)/(4a^2)-c/a)$.

Finally we move the $b/(2a)$ to the right and simplify to get the two solutions: $x_(1,2)=(-b+-sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/(2a)$

Here is the text that was typed in:

Example: Solving the quadratic equation.

Suppose $ax^2+bx+c=0$ and $a!=0$.

We first divide by $a$ to get $x^2+b/ax+c/a=0$.
Then we complete the square and obtain
 $x^2+b/ax+(b/(2a))^2-(b/(2a))^2+c/a=0$.

The first three terms factor to give $(x+b/(2a))^2=(b^2)/(4a^2)-c/a$.

Now we take square roots on both sides and get
 $x+b/(2a)=+-sqrt((b^2)/(4a^2)-c/a)$.

Finally we move the $b/(2a)$ to the right and simplify to get 

the two solutions: $x_(1,2)=(-b+-sqrt(b^2-4ac))/(2a)$

Syntax

The syntax used to enter mathematical formula uses the standards of the ASCIIMathML script engine. The main features of this engine are here reported. For further information on what is ASCIIMathML you can go to its homepage.

The main aims of the ASCIIMathML syntax are:

1. close to standard mathematical notation
2. easy to read
3. 3. easy to type

You can use the rich text editor provided by NDA* Portal.com. If the page is viewed by a browser that does not support MathML* or JavaScript, the ASCII formulas are still quite readable. Most users will not have to read the technicalities on this page. If you type

$x^2$ or $a_(mn)$ or $a_{mn}$ or $(x+1)/y$ or $sqrtx$

you pretty much get what you expect: `x^2` or `a_(mn)` or `a_{mn}` or `(x+1)/y` or `sqrtx`. The choice of grouping parenthesis is up to you (they don't have to match either). If the displayed expression can be parsed uniquely without them, they are omitted. Printing the table of constant symbols (below) may be helpful (but is not necessary if you know the LaTeX equivalents).

The syntax is very permissive and does not generate syntax errors. This allows mathematically incorrect expressions to be displayed.

The parser uses no operator precedence and only respects the grouping brackets, subscripts, superscript, fractions and (square) roots. This is done for reasons of efficiency and generality. The resulting MathML* code can quite easily be processed further to ensure additional syntactic requirements of any particular application.

The grammar: Here is a definition of the grammar used to parse ASCIIMathML expressions. In the Backus-Naur form given below, the letter on the left of the ::= represents a category of symbols that could be one of the possible sequences of symbols listed on the right. The vertical bar | separates the alternatives.

c ::= [A-z] | numbers | greek letters | other constant symbols (see below)
u ::= 'sqrt' | 'text' | 'bb' |     other unary symbols for font commands
b ::= 'frac' | 'root' | 'stackrel' binary symbols
l ::= ( | [ | { | (: | {:          left brackets
r ::= ) | ] | } | :) | :}          right brackets
S ::= c | lEr | uS | bSS | "any"   simple expression
E ::= SE | S/S |S_S | S^S | S_S^S  expression (fraction, sub-, super-, subsuperscript)

In the rules above, the expression `S'` is the same as `S`, except that if `S` has an outer level of brackets, then `S'` is the expression inside these brackets.

Matrices: A simple syntax for matrices is also recognized:
l(`S_(11)`,...,`S_(1n)`),(...),(`S_(m1)`,...,`S_(mn)`)r or l[`S_(11)`,...,`S_(1n)`],[...],[`S_(m1)`,...,`S_(mn)`]r.
Here l and r stand for any of the left and right brackets (just like in the grammar they do not have to match). Both of these expressions are translated to
<mrow>l<mtable><mtr><mtd>`S_(11)`</mtd>... <mtd>`S_(1n)`</mtd></mtr>... <mtr><mtd>`S_(m1)`</mtd>... <mtd>`S_(mn)`</mtd></mtr></mtable>r</mrow>.
For example {(S_(11),...,S_(1n)),(,...,),(S_(m1),...,S_(mn))] displays as `{(S_(11),...,S_(1n)),(,...,),(S_(m1),...,S_(mn))]`.
Note that each row must have the same number of expressions, and there should be at least two rows.

Spaces are significant when they separate characters and thus prevent a certain string of characters from matching one of the constants. Multiple spaces and end-of-line characters are equivalent to a single space.

For a complete list of constants (standard LaTeX names also work):

• Numbers: A string of digits, optionally preceded by a minus sign, and optionally followed by a decimal point (a period) and another string of digits, is parsed as a single token and converted to a MathML* number, i.e., enclosed with the <mn> tag. If it is not desirable to have a preceding minus sign be part of the number, a space should be inserted. Thus x-1 is converted to <mi>x</mi><mn>-1</mn>, whereas x - 1 is converted to <mi>x</mi><mo>-</mo><mn>1</mn>.
• Greek letters: alpha `alpha` beta `beta` chi `chi` delta `delta` Delta `Delta` epsilon `epsilon` varepsilon `varepsilon` eta `eta` gamma `gamma` Gamma `Gamma` iota `iota` kappa `kappa` lambda `lambda` Lambda `Lambda` mu `mu` nu `nu` omega `omega` Omega `Omega` phi `phi` varphi `varphi` Phi `Phi` pi `pi` Pi `Pi` psi `psi` Psi `Psi` rho `rho` sigma `sigma` Sigma `Sigma` tau `tau` theta `theta` vartheta `vartheta` Theta `Theta` upsilon `upsilon` xi `xi` Xi `Xi` zeta `zeta`