Designs on the web

In 2001, the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council awarded three of the authors of this paper a grant for “A web-based resource for design theory”. As the project developed, we have had to face a number of problems, ranging from fundamental questions such as “What is a design?”, through research topics such as “How should the concept of partial balance be extended to designs which do not have constant block size?”, to more practical problems concerning what format we should use to store designs. This paper gives a brief description of the project to date, concentrating on theoretical questions about designs and their classification.