Ken Geis of UC Berkeley sent me this e‑mail today and I thought others would be interested in his Grants.gov tools. They help with the PureEdge forms right now and Ken plans to update them for the new Adobe forms (and would welcome help!). From Ken’s e‑mail:
I thought you might be interested in the tools I developed at UC Berkeley to help us out with Grants.gov applications. I recently Open Sourced the programs. They are at
http://ggsuite.sourceforge.net/
You can try them out at
FormFiller
http://www.spo.berkeley.edu:8080/ggfiller/FormChecker
http://www.spo.berkeley.edu:8080/ggchecker/
And from the Sourceforge site:
- XFOM is a library for reading, writing, and manipulating XFDL (PureEdge) e‑forms. It provides an object model for XFDL.
- FormFiller is a web application for pre-filling key information in a Grants.gov application package. For example, it can fill in institutional information such as the contact information for the Authorized Organizational Representative and contact information for the Principal Investigator. It can also modify the behavior of the form; for example, if the application is for NIH, the NIH Commons ID is required on the R&R Key Person Profile form.
- FormChecker is a web application for validating Grants.gov application packages before submitting them. It includes some agency specific validations on top of the basic validations performed by the application package.
As open source, anyone can adopt, update, and elaborate upon these tools — so go to it! Big kudos to Ken and UC Berkeley for making this code freely available.
[Updated 4/21/2007 11:29 EDT: Changed text to reflect new information; according to Ken, the tools will be updated to support Adobe forms.]