OKI Community

OpeniWorld:Europe2008

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:38:29 -0400

Registration for OpeniWorld:Europe2008 is now open - you will find more information at http://www.openiworld.org/ Note that the early registration deadline is April 30th, so please sign up soon to take advantage of reduced rates. Please also visit the updated OpeniWorld website for new information about this summer's event, including - Limited offer early registration/hotel packages - Preliminary schedule - The SIGBL-KOHA pre-conference - Keynote speaker bios - Pointers to Lyon area information We look forward to seeing you in Lyon this June -------------- OpeniWorld:Europe2008 "Federating Resources Through Open Interoperability" A Symposium and Workshop Lyon, France -- June 24-27, 2008 For its first European event, to be hosted in France by the Lyon 2 University (member of the Lyon University Consortium) in collaboration with MIT�s Open Knowledge Initiative, OpeniWorld will focus its attention on resource federation, one of today�s key educational technology challenges. Federation offers much promise for inter-institutional collaboration towards more effective learning as well as significant market opportunities for providers and consumers of educational content, software and services. http://www.openiworld.org/

Repository Interoperability Bootcamp

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:49:45 -0500

Verbena Consulting instructor Jeff Kahn now offers 1-day and 2-day training course, entitled �Repository Interoperability Bootcamp�. The course focuses on the use of the Open Knowledge Initiative Repository Open Services Interface Definition (Repository OSID), in combination with other education standards and industry best practices, to address several solution spaces: (1) Exposing content to consuming applications. This area shows developers how to expose content from a repository, including browse, search, metadata, upload, and download, using an interoperability standard developed by O.K.I. and refined and validated across the industry. (2) Federated search of content systems from a user-facing application. The operations can be performed in a dedicated federated search tool, a pedagogical tool, a presentation tool, etc. (3) Creating a registry of OSID implementations or applications. Some organizations want to manage OSID implementations or applications in a registry. (1) Exposing content to consuming applications. This area shows developers how to expose content from a repository, including browse, search, metadata, upload, and download, using an interoperability standard developed by O.K.I. and refined and validated across the industry. When developers are working with a content system that already has a programmatic mechanism for this work, the training focuses on fitting their existing approach into a OSID implementation. When developers have a content system with no programmatic mechanism for browse and search, additional discussion can cover best practices and design suggestions. Sample topics include: Mapping content systems to one or more "Repository" objects Authentication and Authorization approaches "Repository" object metadata "Repository" configuration Browsing a "Repository" Basic and Advanced Searching of a "Repository" Repository "Assets" and their metadata Navigating the result set "Asset" versions, metadata inheritance, and "shadow" metadata Strategies for improving how "Assets" appear in federated searches Retaining your brand Using the OSID Testing Framework for Test-Driven Development Packaging OSID implementations for a Registry (2) Federated search of content systems from a user-facing application. The operations can be performed in a dedicated federated search tool, a pedagogical tool, a presentation tool, etc. Examples of user-facing applications with this capability include a Blackboard Build Block for Federated Search, The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) from Tufts University, Visualizing Cultures from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the presentation tool, Pachyderm, and others. Developers may have an existing application that needs a federated search function or a modification of this support. The application may be dedicated to discovering content in a specific repository and may need to introduce an extensibility strategy to support content from new sources. Developers may not have an application written yet, but know that federated search, browse, etc, will be required. Sample topics include: Discovering new sources of content; installation and update Configuring (including authentication and authorization) instances of Repository OSID implementations Browsing one or more repositories Search a single repository or a federated search Reconciling different levels of search support, metadata schema, and asset types across repositories Organizing result sets from a federated search Exposing repository brands in federated search results Working with an implementation registry: discover, install, update, uninstall, configure (3) Creating a registry of OSID implementations or applications. Some organizations want to manage OSID implementations or applications in a registry. The registry acts as a catalog for discover and a quality control measure. Sample topics include: Discussion of the Registry OSID and its reference implementation Discussion of options for a repository of implementations and applications Review of suggested catalog metadata Manual installation options to compliment use of the registry (4) The Repository OSID has been as a component in a number of use cases. A discussion will review: Federated submission Asset migration A Case Study of moving from raw assets to an extensible system Format The course can be held on-site and includes a mix of lecture and hands-on. Developers are free to work with instructor-provided sample code, but are also encouraged to bring specific content system or application projects. Based on the length of the course and the number of participants, there will be time for coding and an interoperability "plug fest". Deliverables The deliverable for this proposal is the on-site course given by Jeff Kahn. Participants in the course will receive copies all appropriate materials, including documentation and source code. Participants can join a graduates-only mailing list, which provides a support community with no expiration date. Requirements Participants must complete appropriate pre-work prior to attending the Bootcamp. Pre-work will be posted to the Bootcamp Wiki. Participants must provide their own computers and development environment. The meeting room requires Internet access, a laptop project, and suitable power for the number of participants. The maximum number of participants is 10. For more information, contact: Jeff Kahn Verbena Consulting verbenaconsulting@comcast.net (678) 339-0674

OpeniWorld:Europe2008

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:02:10 -0500

A Symposium and Workshop on Federating Resources Lyon, June 25-27, 2008 For its first European event, to be hosted by the Lyon 2 University (member of the Lyon University Consortium), OpeniWorld will focus its attention on resource federation, one of today�s key educational technology challenges. Federation offers much promise for inter-institutional collaboration towards more effective learning as well as significant market opportunities for providers and consumers of educational content, software and services. OpeniWorld will address the opportunities, challenges, and solutions relating to federating educational resources through both a symposium event and a technology showcase. http://openiworld.org/Symposium.html

PHP & OKI Community Summit

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:07:31 -0400

Middlebury College is hosting a PHP & O.K.I. Community Summit to be held in Middlebury VT, USA on September 26th and 27th. The purpose of this summit meeting is to introduce the PHP bindings of the Open Knowledge Initiative open service interface definitions (OSIDs), showcase some existing implementations and discuss how to leverage these standards to define services for a wide range of curricular applications. Whether you are an educational technologist looking to integrate PHP based applications into your educational enterprise or a software developer wishing to learn more about these open standards for PHP application interoperability you are welcome to join us. Join the PHP OKI Commmunithy here: http://harmoni.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/PHP_OKI_Community Workgroup topics will include: * Overview of Middlebury's Harmoni OSID service framework * Demonstration of curricular applications (Segue and Concerto) built with Harmoni and the OSIDs * Moodlerooms' Enterprise Integration strategy * OSID V3 PHP binding * Cross language interoperability * Project and Architectural Updates (TBD) California State University Digital Marketplace Initiative Campus Project (Lead by Open University of Catalonia)

Sophie

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:31:09 -0400

Sophie's raison d'�tre is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people. http://www.sophieproject.org/ Originally conceived as a standalone multimedia authoring tool, Sophie is now integrated into the Web 2.0 network in some very powerful ways: Sophie documents can be uploaded to a server and then streamed over the net It's possible to embed remote audio, video and graphic text files in the pages of Sophie documents meaning that the actual document that needs to be distributed might be only a few hundred kilobytes even if the book itself is comprised of hundreds of megabytes or even a few gigabytes. Sophie now has the ability to browse OKI (open knowledge initiative) repositories from within Sophie itself and then to embed objects from those repositories. We now have live dynamic text fields (similar to the Institute's CommentPress experiments on the web) such that a comment written in the margin is displayed immediately in every other copy of that book - anywhere in the world.

Opening the Apple Learning Interchange to Federated Content Discovery and (Re)Use

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 11:45:12 -0400

The strength of the O.K.I. specifications, particularly the Repository OSID, is beginning to manifest an informal yet growing network effect as the number of repositories, content providers and consumers, and large education initiatives embrace OSIDs. In fact, the informal discovery of the Mellon Funded Sophie Project (http://www.sophieproject.org/) and its search webservice to content repositories covered by OSID implementations made the case for moving forward with Apple Education's plans to begin opening its Apple Learning Interchange (ALI). At the upcoming OpeniWorld conference (www.openiworld.org) Apple Education will showcase a proof-of-concept implementation using the O.K.I. Repository OSID specification to normalize federated content discovery across heterogeneous content repositories and providers. Leveraging external content provides richer resources to the ALI community, and in turn provides an opportunity for ALI users to make their content more broadly discoverable. ALI is a global, free social networking and content sharing service for educators hosted by Apple Education. Originally designed in 1999 as a repository for education "exhibits" published by select content providers, the new ALI 2.0 is completely redesigned and re-architected to foster collaboration between community members, social networking across common interests, and content portability with mobile devices. ALI embraces the open exchange and reuse of education content within its community through Creative Commons licensing tags. Over the years, education content contributed by ALI members, institutions, and select content providers has lead to a growing and vibrant community. The recently added social networking features bring Web 2.0 functionality so ad-hoc groups can form around content and topics of interest. ALI also supports managing personal and group collections of content found within the system. Recently, Apple Education began considering how best to open ALI up in terms of the content its community members could discover and use, and how ALI contributors could "write once" in ALI but be discoverable outside ALI. How could ALI be more social and its content networked outside its walled-garden? The basic problem is content federation, but due diligence showed no easy answer. Do we settle on a single integration method, or collection of methods, and dictate that others support our decision? Was there a clearly leading standard to settle on? The number of competing standards for meta-data, communication protocols, query structures and languages, etc., all pointed to resource intensive processes of research, persuasion, and implementation. There has to be a better way. The strength of the O.K.I. specifications, particularly the Repository OSID, is beginning to manifest an informal yet growing network effect as the number of repositories, content providers and consumers, and large education initiatives embrace OSIDs. In fact, the informal discovery of the Mellon Funded Sophie Project (http://www.sophieproject.org/) and its search webservice to content repositories covered by OSID implementations made the case for moving forward with Apple Education's plans to begin opening ALI. Apple Education will showcase a proof-of-concept implementation using the O.K.I. Repository OSID specification to normalize federated content discovery across heterogeneous content repositories and providers. Leveraging external content provides richer resources to the ALI community, and in turn provides an opportunity for ALI users to make their content more broadly discoverable. The showcase will also highlight ALI's: - Creation/Import/Export of LOMs through Studywiz (a third party K-12 LMS) installations - User-created and 'mashed' content through the iTunes/media-browser bridge - Creative-commons filters - Personal and group collections management in ALI

Harvest Road to Showcase Interoperability in Action

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:55:29 -0400

Join us in New Orleans at the OpeniWorld Conference ( www.openiworld.org) to experience real-world solutions being developed in conjunction with the French Province of Lyon, Universities and Colleges (PUL) and The California State University's Digital Marketplace initiative. HarvestRoad Hive� emphasizes discovery, collaboration, delivery and management of content. By enabling enterprises or institutions to rapidly aggregate content into a central repository and by providing federated access to other repositories it enables clients to discover, reuse and repurpose dispersed content and transform it into contextualized content that is tailored to discrete user communities. Harvest Road's support of the O.K.I. Repository Open Service Interface Definition ensures it has the capability to provide federated search capabilities to its clients via HarvestRoad Hive� Explorer or its Configurable Interface Application, and also ensures that HarvestRoad Hive� can be searched via other Federated Search Tools. The support of open standards and specifications in Harvest Road's products have been critical to their adoption for supporting cross-enterprise solutions at The CSU and the PUL. The PUL is an organization of 12 colleges and universities, 300 laboratories and 95,000 students in order to share, and facilitate the added value of, it�s educational resources. The University's vision is to create an organization and federation of multiple electronic document repositories (including text, audio, video, and rich media content) from it�s faculty across its many institutions. The goal of CSU's Digital Marketplace initiative is to enable the effective distribution of network-based digital goods and resources in support of CSU academic programs. This is based on the growing need to effectively acquire, share, market, and distribute commercial and non-commercial digital learning content and resources within the institutional environment; and to integrate the content within instructional programs. In addition, This demonstrator will focus on a number of interoperability scenarios including: * Federated Search and Discovery of Content: Prior to authoring and assembling new Learning Objects a content author should have the ability to determine if an object already exists that can be reused and repurposed. This requires the ability to search across all available and authorized repositories or registries. * Content Reuse: Within the HarvestRoad Hive� Explorer for RELOAD application a content author can search and discover knowledge assets that can be re-used and re-purposed within a new IMS or SCORM Content Package being assembled within RELOAD. * Resource List Management: The RLMS (In this scenario Harvest Road's Resource List Management System) is then able to present these structured resource or reading lists to students from within the RLMS application itself or as part of an integrated offering within a Learning Management System course structure. About HarvestRoad HarvestRoad Limited is a technology company based in Perth, Western Australia, with local offices in Sydney, Canberra, USA, Canada, London and Lyon and global partners in Europe, UK, USA, Latin America, and Asia. Established in 1996 and publicly listed on the Australian Stock Exchange [ASX: HRD] in September 1999, HarvestRoad has developed software for the eLearning and eTraining markets in education, government, defense, and enterprise. In September 2006 market leader IBM (NYSE:IBM) became an equity stakeholder in HarvestRoad. HarvestRoad HiveR is an integral component of the IBM Collaborative Learning for Education solution.

An OSID Based Application Framework

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:19:25 -0400

At the upcoming OpeniWorld ( http://www.openiworld.org ) Middlebury College will showcase Harmoni, an open source PHP application framework. Harmoni provides the basics for quickly developing educational applications that will easily integrate into an institution's IT infrastructure. The Harmoni framework is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows such applications to share content and functionality through the O.K.I. open service interface definitions (OSIDs). This means that faculty and students can use a wide range of tools for teaching, learning and research and that those tools can be maintained more easily because they rely on a set common services. Most interoperability initiatives use standards in their external application programming interfaces (APIs). Harmoni turns this paradigm around by making the interoperability standards, the O.K.I. open service interface definitions (OSIDs), the primary internal API of the system. This design allows an application's data and functionality to be accessible through the OSIDs from its inception. Even more importantly, alternate OSID implementations from third parties may be swapped for those shipped in the framework so that applications can make use of a wide range of infrastructures allowing the framework to evolve. Most interoperability initiatives use standards in their external application programming interfaces (APIs). Harmoni turns this paradigm around by making the interoperability standards, the O.K.I. open service interface definitions (OSIDs), the primary internal API of the system. This design allows an application's data and functionality to be accessible through the OSIDs from its inception. Even more importantly, alternate OSID implementations from third parties may be swapped for those shipped in the framework so that applications can make use of a wide range of infrastructures allowing the framework to evolve. "As the number of implemented systems increased we soon realized that we needed to build our applications on a shared framework in order to prevent the impending maintenance nightmare of supporting many applications with marginally divergent code-bases," said Adam Franco, Middlebury's Curricular Technology Programmer/Analyst and lead developer of Harmoni. "Given a dearth of frameworks suitable for our needs we embarked on the process of developing our own, the Harmoni Application Framework. Our primary goal in the design of Harmoni was to encapsulate much of the common code needed by curricular applications into framework services to prevent the need for reinventing these common pieces in each application. The O.K.I. Open Service Interface Definition (OSID) services happened to be a perfect fit with the services that we envisioned." Using the O.K.I. OSIDs as the primary internal API of the Harmoni Application Framework provides a host of benefits as well as a few challenges. Middlebury developers will demonstrate how Harmoni can be used to integrate systems for managing learning content and digital assets, allowing faculty and students to develop large searchable collections of assets that can then be used in course sites, blogs, wikis, e-porfolios and so on. "We are seeing our first benefit of using the OSIDs in this configuration as we build multiple applications that interact with the same data in different ways." said Alex Chapin, Middlebury's Principal Curricular Technologist. "These currently include our Concerto open source digital asset management system, and Segue V2, the latest version of our learning content management system which we plan to release this fall." In addition, through the use of OSIDs as a native framework interface it becomes very easy to provide access to application data for external applications. This has been realized through a recent integration with the University of Oregon's open source LibraryFind tool. The final major benefit that Middlebury hopes to gain from their OSID based approach is the ability to selectively replace some or all of our OSID implementations with those provided by third parties. "As the ecosystem of OSID implementations grows I am confident that other teams will develop implementations of various OSIDs that perform much better than our own in a given context," said Mr. Chapin. "Using the OSIDs as our internal API opens the possibility of using these new implementations to support our applications without requiring changes to these applications." "What the team at Middlebury has achieved is a tremendous benefit to those building enterprise applications in PHP," said Stuart Sim, CTO of MoodleRooms. "MoodleRooms will be using the Harmoni work to inject OSIDs into the Moodle project that will allow the world-wide Moodle community to rapidly develop integration connectors to existing applications and infrastructure and to leverage the existing connectors in the OSID community."

Digital Marketplace Project

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 11:33:55 -0400

The goal of the Digital Marketplace (DMP) initiative is to enable the effective distribution of network-based digital goods and resources in support of the California State University (CSU) academic programs. This is based on the growing need to effectively acquire, share, market, and distribute commercial and non-commercial digital learning content and resources within the institutional environment; and to integrate the content within instructional programs. The Digital Marketplace Project The objectives of the Digital Marketplace initiative are to: * Act as a collaborative function to provide leverage with vendors for campus academic technology products and services, resulting in reduced costs through "volume" negotiations with vendors. * Provide a one-stop, web-based service for the selection, contribution, sharing, approval, procurement and distribution of no-cost and cost-based academic technology products and service, resulting in the coordinated development and delivery of academic technology products and services on a systemwide basis. * Reliably and securely manage the digital rights and usage of academic technologies.

OSID V3 Webcast

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:03:22 -0400

Please join us for a webcast on June 28th at 1:00pm US Eastern Time for an early look at the OSID V3 draft. This is the kickoff of a period of extended comment and refinement, leading to a new release later this year. The following link can be used to join the webcast: http:// educationcommons.org/live/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1181846015192 The dial-in number is 866-242-7949 Conference Code 6172521981. See below for a list of international toll-free numbers. There is also a non-toll-free international dial in number that you can use: 770-790-2305 Since published in 2004, the O.K.I. Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) have been used to provide a solid framework for achieving many-to-many interoperability among software components and systems, and have seen growing adoption worldwide. The V3 draft has been developed around the experiences throughout the OSID development community over the past three years to provide a clearer and more functional set of software interface definitions to meet growing demands. Some of the significant changes and additions include: * more explicit profiling of interoperability * session management * an interface-based means of extending OSID objects * interface-based search mechanisms * paging of results * search within results * support for asynchronous notifications of new, changed or deleted OSID objects * support for hierarchical Types * the ability to organize or tag OSID objects within catalogs * support for proxy authentication through the OSIDs for server applications * the ability to customize the OSID runtime environment * new OSIDs: Localization Configuration OSID Installation Provisioning of Resources Data Transport Learning Objectives Type Management ----------------- International Toll-Free Dial-In Number(s): Argentina Dial-In #: 08005557913 Australia Dial-In #: 1800008432 Austria Dial-In #: 0800291434 Bahamas Dial-In #: 18665985177 Belgium Dial-In #: 080071203 Brazil Dial-In #: 08008916187 Chile Dial-In #: 12300206178 China Dial-In #: 108007130754 China Dial-In #: 108001300754 Colombia Dial-In #: 018007001683 Costa Rica Dial-In #: 08000130936 Cyprus Dial-In #: 80095742 Czech Republic Dial-In #: 800142211 Denmark Dial-In #: 80881802 Dominican Republic Dial-In #: 18887514629 Finland Dial-In #: 0800115429 France Dial-In #: 0800907677 Germany Dial-In #: 08001813822 Greece Dial-In #: 0080018092017562 Hong Kong Dial-In #: 800900016 Hungary Dial-In #: 0680017135 Iceland Dial-In #: 8008253 India Dial-In #: 0008001001033 Indonesia Dial-In #: 0018030152017565 Ireland Dial-In #: 1800553838 Israel Dial-In #: 1809315368 Italy Dial-In #: 800786628 Jamaica Dial-In #: 18002150031 Japan Dial-In #: 00531115035 Korea (South) Dial-In #: 00308140478 Latvia Dial-In #: 8002140 Lithuania Dial-In #: 880030238 Luxembourg Dial-In #: 80024508 Malaysia Dial-In #: 1800808201 Mexico Dial-In #: 0018663165126 Monaco Dial-In #: 80093259 Netherlands Dial-In #: 08000225892 New Zealand Dial-In #: 0800448874 Norway Dial-In #: 80015510 Panama Dial-In #: 0018002018500 Peru Dial-In #: 080052203 Poland Dial-In #: 008001113629 Portugal Dial-In #: 800819526 Russian Federation Dial-In #: 81080023201012 Saint Kitts and Nevis Dial-In #: 18007449304 Singapore Dial-In #: 8001011513 South Africa Dial-In #: 0800994988 Spain Dial-In #: 900961243 Sweden Dial-In #: 020791848 Switzerland Dial-In #: 0800562494 Taiwan Dial-In #: 00801148627 Thailand Dial-In #: 001800132017579 Trinidad and Tobago Dial-In #: 18002031411 Turkey Dial-In #: 00800130098743 United Kingdom Dial-In #: 08000320432 Uruguay Dial-In #: 00040190037 Venezuela Dial-In #: 08001003430