Appendices

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1. Construction sequence for building QES curriculum mapping pages for EOAS

As of Dec 2021, there are single pages for each map, including pointers to both SSC and UBCExplorer. EOSC, ATSC and ENVR course codes also link to course webpages on the EOAS website. When mouse is over any course code, the name and description pops up. This is currently done using <title> tags within the <text> or <tspan> tags. Eventually we would prefer popups to include course learnign objectives and links to corresponding departmental pages, but this will require more sophisticated coding.

Here is an outline of the construction procedure.

Make chart images in PowerPoint.
Save as an SVG file, edit the result in VS-Code with an SVG plugin, and immediately re-flow to format whole document (select all, right click)

The <def> section will be large with some <LinearGradient> definitions, but that’s OK.
Powerpoint seems to add some unnecessary HUGE paths within a <g> element. They can be dumped reducing file size by an order of magnitude (eg from 250k to 40k).

Add HTML to the top/bottom of the file and save as HTML instead of SVG. If you add a font-family style to the HTML <body>, MS classes & fonts introduced by the Powerpoint-to-SVG conversion can be removed using search/replace. Maybe include pointers to useful places such as: credit exclusion list, QES specialization descriptions (geoph, ocgy, atsc), EOAS specialization descriptions, or others.
Prepare text strings for the links to ssc, exp, EOAS webpages, etc by building a spreadsheet with all courses, codes, names, descriptions. Use concatenate formulae to generate the hyperlink and title strings that will be plugged into corresponding locations of the SVG segment of these HTML files. For examples, see the spreadsheet in the folder with HTML files; filename "AllPrereqs.xlsx".
Add links to the ssc and exp words for every course. This can be efficient by being creative with search and replace to find course codes like "EOSC" or "MATH", etc.
Wrap the <a> tags around text within the <text> or <tspan> tags.
Ensure the links point to a separate browser tab using "target='tabname'" in the <a> tag
The mouseover popup names with descriptions are done as <title> tags within <text> or <tspan> tags.
All course names other than EOSC, ENVR, ATSC have no hyperlinks, therefore null links need adding like this: <a href="">.

2. Editing after converting from SVG to HTML

Adding all the links is time consuming, therefore editing the graphic by changing the PowerPoint graphic and resaving may be inefficient. However, some parts of the SVG graphic can be edited directly. Here are a few hints:

Graphics (boxes, lines, etc.) are hard to edit after converting. If changes are minor, make a new version in PowerPoint, save to SVG, then identify the difference between the new and old versions.
Text strings can be edited by searching for the text string and replacing .
Adding new text is not easy because you have to know exactly how to place it on the page. However it is not hard to edit in PowerPoint, save to SVG, then compare old and new versions and add new content accordingly.

3. Examples of other ways of mapping course dependencies.

UBCexplorer.io facility was built by UBC computerscience students. Information is provided in a well-designed and informative manner. It fetches data from UBC's PAIR site with each request so data should always be up to date. However it is unclear whether the site will be maintained indefinitly.
UBC Computer science Interactive curriculum map is online on their Prerequisite Rules page. This includes maps showing dependencies among UBC Computer Science courses only (i.e. courses in other departments (eg. Math) are not included. Clicking any course dot reveals a table of Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs), if they exist. The maps are built using JavaScript and data for drawing the maps are gathered in large JSON tables. This is a non-trivial approach. Code and data are in a public GitHub repository but there were no instructions there in Nov. 2021. Prof. Rachel Pottinger was project lead and past CS Assoc Head Undergrad Affairs. She did agree to answer questions
UBC-Okanagan has been building a Curriculum Mapping Facility (Spring 2021). There is an intro video (35 mins) here, given by Laura Prada and Janine Hirtz. (Also Bowen Hui, prof in compsci at UBC-OK, Anita Chaudhuri, assist teaching prof in English.) It was given May 21, 2021, so may be out of date by now. This probably deserves further investigation as it was a work in progress when first seen.
A commercial mind-mapping facility called Rhumbl has been used by MIT opencourseware. At Aug 2021, it costs $5 - $11 / month with only a 14-day free preview. Brief inspections suggest it is not really what we need, but it might be inspiring in some ways.
If there are other good approaches please let fjones@eoas.ubc.ca know.