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August 06, 2003
MERLOT: Re-Engineering a National Online Portal
EdNA -- Education Network Australia
began in 95 to facilitate collaboration across territories in Australia
EdNA online portal resulted out of need to facilitate collaboration
http://www.edna.edu.au
This MERLOT session addresses the re-engineering of EdNA. Great focus on the use of RSS to syndicate content from their portal.
History of EdNa
Re-engineering EdNa Online
Technologies, Specs, Standards
Functional Advantages of MyEdna
Walkthrough
EdNA Online launched in 97
collaboration across states and across sectors
"K to gray" -- kindergarten to lifelong learning
fully funded by gov't
records built from combination of data entry and automated harvesting
only harvest from trusted sources
EdNA Metadata Standards v1.1
based on Dublin Core
nine mandatory elements (out of 15)
History of EdNA Online
Target audience
support teaching and learning form early childhood to adult/community education
services
access to curriculum resources, research, professional devleopment
pool of over 350,000 items to search (17,500 quality evaluated, 330,000 linked items, 50,000 items from external repositories)
500 mail lists supporting online communication
online newsletters (more than 16,000 subscribers)
4 million hits per month
Re-Engineering EdNA Online
why? stakeholders told them to
business service delivery models
from a retail website to aggregator/broker/provider of web services
retail -- personalisation and portal services
broker -- harvesting and federated searching
wholesale -- web services
portal tech enable new service delivery alternatives
demand for more sophisticated resource discovery mechanisms
technical considerations
outsourcing arrangement
emerging technologies, specifications and open standards
open source software .... really "collaborative source"
[didn't name the software that's used]
use RSS, XML, SOAP
technologies and standards need to be open standards in order to collaborate and interoperate
web services
RSS feeds for news, recent items added
modiel of syndicating all content via RSS
XML APIs for Search and Browse
XML API for noticeboards/calendars, New Resources Added
SOAP for single sign-on
Publishing to handheld specs
Entry Level points to makee services easily available
HTML versions of most services available
Technologies, Specs, Standards
Resource Delivery: Dublin Core, EdNA Metadata Standard v1.1, RDF
Vocabulary: AGIFT, SCIS, ScOT, ATED, VOCED, OZJAC
Metadata Repository Interchange:
yadda yadda yadda too many standards to capture here.
based on J2EE
[technical architecture graphic ... too much to capture]
Linux, Apache, Tomcat based
Sun/Oracle for the database server
Jahia -- open source content management system
walkthrough....
[hard to capture this in text]
shows lots of mechanisms where they are both consuming feeds and producing feeds for others to consume.
question from Stephen Downes: why using federated search as well as harvesting metadata?
answer: first, concern about "flooding" EdNA with metadata that may be less than stellar....that then can be addressed through federated search. second, some repositories don't want their metadata harvested & will only allow search. federated searching will have its limitations, and EdNA recognizes that.
question: what is RSS.
[Whoa! That's a big question.] Stephen Downes provided a solid answer, focusing on the key elements link, title, description
Posted August 6, 2003 07:54 PM