Management of the Affiliations by the Admin

Owned by Monika Fiedorowicz
Last updated: Dec 30, 2023 by Henryk Rybinski
3 min read

The Affiliation Database is used to store the structure of the University for which the Knowledge Base is run.

The database can be fed once from an ERP system of the University or other university resources, if available. Usualy, such an initialization provides only some basic information about the units, therefore a manual editorial work on the units description is strongly recommended. In the course of operation, the database should be supplemented depending on the organizational changes of the university. It should also be supplemented with the data of other authors associated with the unit: doctoral students, graduate students, retirees, etc.

Note: The Affiliation Database cannot be changed by editors. Only a person with administrator privileges has the ability to make changes to these objects; she/he can also make global changes. After each change in the structure of the affiliation tree, it is essential to use the 'Reset Affiliation Tree' button (to be sure, 2 times), located above the affiliation tree, because only then the changes made are actually reflected in the system.

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Tree structure of the University

The description of units contains the elements shown in the figure below on the example of the description of the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology of the Warsaw University of Technology. The description of the Department contains similar elements as the description of a subordinate unit, e.g. Institute, and only the field "Parent Affiliation" indicates Warsaw University of Technology. However, in the case of the root (the highest level), the field is empty.

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Profile tab

In the case of Warsaw University of Technology, a two-level structure tree has been applied, e.g..

Faculty/Institute or Faculty/Cathedral or Faculty/Department.

Any division of the scientific institution and its units is possible. In principle, the structure of the institution should reflect the formal structure of the University, but it is recommended to place only those units that participate in the production of scientific and research output of the institution. It is also worth noting that placing units of lower levels (e.g., level 3 or 4) may not be very useful, and due to frequent changes in the structure at these levels, may cause a lot of trouble in maintaining consistency and proper affiliation of employees. Instead, there is another structure available which is Research Team. Research teams are linked to the parent units, but they are not shown in the structure field.

The affiliation tree is presented in the following screenshot