2007 Melllon Foundation RIT/SC Retreat
Agenda
Thursday 29 March
• 8-9am Breakfast • 9-10:30a Project Updates (15 min ea.) – Fedora, OKI, VUE, KFS, Kuali Rice, ORE • 10:30-10:45a Break • 10:45a-12:15pProject Updates (30 min ea.) – Zotero, Didily, SIMILE • 12:15-1:15p Lunch • 1:15-1:45p Presentations/Discussion (30 min ea.) – Sophie • 1:45-3:15p Presentations/Discussion (45 min ea.) – Kuali Student, FLUID • 3:15-3:30p Break • 3:30-4:15p Presentations - SEASR • 4:15-4:30p ARTstor • 4:30-5:15p Discussion – "Scholarly Cyberinfrastructure for the Arts and Humanities" • 6-8p Cocktail Reception • Dinner on your own in Princeton
Friday 30 March
• 8-9am Breakfast • 9-9:15a Presentation – CSU Digital Marketplace • 9:15-9:45a Presentation – OKI Workshop • 9:45-10:30a Presentation - ESB Project • 10:30-10:45a Break • 10:45a-12p Discussion – ”Protecting Precarious Values in Distributed, Collaborative Software Development" • 12-1p Lunch • 1-2:30p Open Discussion, Q&A • 2:30-2:45p Break • 2:45-3p Feedback and Final Remarks • 3p Adjourn
From rit.mellon.org/projects 11 March 2008 OKI Workshop Agenda 27 March 2007 9:00 Welcome and Introductions - Steve Lucas 9:15 Meeting Objectives and Agenda - Ed Walker and Jeff Kahn I. Review Study Findings and Recommendations Break approx. at 10:15
10:30 Roundtable discussion led by moderator Digital Marketplace Overview - Gerry Hanley II. Kuali Student Overview - Jens Haeusser NSNext Steps: GlRldCGoals, Roles and Concerns 11:15 Follow up actions; Objectives for Breakout Sessions - facilitated by Ed Walker Working lunch (buffet Lunch provided)
12:30 Breakout to frame Use Cases, Requirements and Action Plans III. Break as appropriate 2:15 Progress reports and wrap up 3:00 Adjourn
28 March 2007 Copyright 2007, Ithaka 1 Retreat Theme / Discussion Topic
Every RIT/SC Retreat has a theme or topic around which discussions focus. This year's topic is "Precarious Values in Distributed, Collaborative Open-Source Software Development"
For background on the term, see, e.g., “Organizational Adaptation and Precarious Values: A Case Study”, Burton R. Clark. American Sociological Review, Vol. 21, No. 3. (Jun., 1956), pp. 327-336.
“Precarious values” are values that would be affirmed in principle by most members of an organized effort, but that in practice are threatened, marginalized, or deprecated by a lack of substantive commitment. Some values commonly described as precarious in traditional and directed open-source software development projects include:
• accessibility • architectural planning • desktop integration/”fit-and-polish” • user and developer documentation • QA and testing • security • usability
These values contrast with "core values," such as feature development and coder productivity, which are normally reliably rewarded within the projects.
One telltale sign of a precarious value in a development project is that it is not integrated pervasively in the software-development life-cycle but instead either considered early and then ignored thereafter, or more commonly, treated as something to be dealt with only after code has been written. One often hears precarious values described as constantly “clinging to the tail of the elephant.” Another telltale is that precarious values are often delegated to specialists of one sort or another, rather than being tasked as the responsibility of every participant.
We would like each project to come prepared to discuss the precarious value(s) that it sees as most crucial to its continued success, and to discuss together technical and social innovations that might help to integrate those critical values more deeply and pervasively into the development life-cycle.
• Are there organizational structures or processes (organizational design patterns) for distributed, collaborative software development projects that might improve the integration of strategically crucial precarious values? • Are there anti-patterns that should be avoided? • Are there OSS development methodologies that are particularly encouraging or disruptive of attention to precarious values? • What role can technology play in supporting precarious values inside distributed, collaborative OSS projects? • What role does leadership play?
From rit.mellon.org/projects 11 March 2008 Copy of Invitation Letter
January 10, 2007
Friends,
You are cordially invited to attend the 4th annual Research in Information Technology program/Scholarly Communications Retreat.
Our former digs no longer fit all of our expected attendees, so we have changed locations. The retreat will be held on Thursday and Friday, March 29-30, at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, NJ. There will be a cocktail reception in the hotel on the evening of March 29th from 6-8pm (location will be posted in the hotel lobby).
There are some changes to the retreat format this year: we are asking PIs to prepare a short, written project description in order to reduce presentation times and free up more time for discussion. A blueprint for that description, along with a meeting agenda and other logistical details, are available at: http://rit.mellon.org/retreat/2007/
The Foundation will cover all reasonable travel related expenses for your participation. You should feel free to make your own transportation arrangements. (see travel and expense guidelines below). We have appended directions to the hotel from NY/Newark Liberty Airport (NWK) which is the most convenient airport.
Joyce Pierre has reserved a block of rooms for Wednesday, March 28th and Thursday, March 29th at the Nassau Inn, Palmer Square, Princeton, NJ (which is also our meeting site). Please make sure your name is listed on the attachment if you will need lodging. If it’s not listed and it should be, please contact Joyce at [email protected]
Best wishes,
Ira Fuchs and Chris Mackie
From rit.mellon.org/projects 11 March 2008 Travel and Expense Guidelines
The Foundation will provide breakfast and lunch on Thursday and Friday and also make hotel reservations.
The Foundation will pay for the hotel and applicable room tax only, which will be billed directly to the Foundation. All incidentals will be billed directly to you. If you plan to stay at the hotel for additional nights, you should use your personal credit card for those expenses. Reimbursement on flights will be paid with the following guidelines in mind:
• Coach class is required for all domestic flights under five hours. • Business class is permitted on flights over five hours--domestic and international- -when business class is available. • First class is not a permitted substitute for business class.
Also, the Foundation will cover the cost of 2 dinners while attending the retreat. One dinner may be a group affair, in which case the Foundation will pay directly; the other will be at your own initiative, and the Foundation will cover up to $40 of the cost.
For reimbursements, please fill out the attached expense report, staple your receipts to the back, and mail to:
Joyce Pierre 282 Alexander St. Princeton , NJ 08540
From rit.mellon.org/projects 11 March 2008
2007 Melllon Foundation RIT/SC Retreat
Projects
Dossier of current and past RIT projects
Title ARTstor ESB - Carnegie-Mellon FEDORA - Cornell FLUID - Toronto Kuali Financial System - Indiana Kuali Rice - Cornell/Indiana Kuali Research Administration - Indiana Kuali Student - British Columbia LionShare - Penn State MESUR - Los Alamos National Lab MOCSL - Utah State Object Reuse and Exchange - Open Access Initiative Open CourseWare - MIT Open Knowledge Initiative - MIT Sakai - Sakai Foundation SEASR - NCSA (Illinois) Shibboleth - Internet2 Signet/Grouper - Internet2 SIMILE - MIT Sophie - USC/IFFB uPortal - JA-SIG (Delaware) VUE - Tufts Zotero - George Mason
From rit.mellon.org/projects 11 March 2008 Project Name and Start Date ARTstor - 2004 Project URL www.artstor.org Brief (2 para) description of project goals
ARTstor is a non-profit initiative, founded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with a mission to use digital technology to enhance scholarship, teaching and learning in the arts and associated fields. The ARTstor Digital Library Charter Collection is:
• A repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data; • The tools to actively use those images; and • A restricted usage environment that seeks to balance the rights of content providers with the needs and interests of content users.
Participating Institutions and key people Neil L. Rudenstine, Chairman, ARTstor James Shulman, Executive Director, ARTstor Bill Ying, CTO, ARTstor Highlights (anything you particularly want to feature, or that isn’t covered by the items we request) Milestones and deliverables Last 12 months 1. Implementation of Metasearch XML gateway so external systems can search into ARTstor. This includes both search engines like Serial solutions and webfeat plus Java clients like VUE etc. JSTOR is also adding a search into ARTstor feature in the main JSTOR site too using this XML gateway with thumbnail display. 2. We have successfully implemented multiple OAI project with Getty, Harvard, and started work with other museums like Metropolitan museums. We also started development work on building OAI providers on top of external systems like MDID and ContentDM. 3. We have made one of our Java based image tool OIV as a freeware that is freely available. CY 2007 Anticipated 1. We are planning to migrate ARTstor from a proprietary Java platform based on Nexaweb to the open source AJAX platform. 2. We plan to develop an open source local cataloging system that will tightly integrate with ARTstor for local collection submission thru OAI plus tight integration with local institutions repository such as FEDORA and DSPACE. 3. We plan to open source our work that we have done in extending OAI development. 4. We plan to continue working with our partners in interoperability issues and projects. In particular, working towards a better metadata standard.
Community Current Status 1. ARTstor has more than 732 institution participants. 2. There are more than 1,000 OIV freeware download since last September. Contributors/users 1. Contributed code to the code4lib community and our museum partners Plans for development 1. Open source as much as possible code developed by ARTstor. Progress toward those plans 1. Participate in high education developer community and museum cultural communities. Synergy opportunities with other projects (think ‘publish’, not ‘subscribe’)
Hopefully will find more after the retreat.
Enterprise Service Bus Exploratory Effort
Enterprise Service Bus Exploratory Effort Assessing the need for ESB solutions throughout the education community and if possible recommend a solution that will act as a catalyst to enable the rapid deployment of new cost effective applications for the arts, humanities, the sciences as well as other academic and administrative domains.
Start Date: February, 1st 2007
URL: http://tid.ithaka.org/enterprise-service-bus (closed site at this time)
Description: The goal of the effort is to identify possible open-source and commercial enterprise service bus product offering candidates that meet with requirements of the Mellon supported Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) efforts and projects. The group proposes to achieve the following objectives during the duration of the project.
• To provide formative evaluation information that can assist any project looking for an OSS and/or commercial ESB. • To assess if it is possible to re-purpose of the ESB from financial/administrative to academic support and to ascertain at a high lever if it will require substantial re- development or re-configuration, and to provide first-steps guidance as to what changes are likely to be required • To assess the state of the best OSS/commercial ESB product(s) against the dominant commercial alternatives (must include Oracle Fusion ESB in all evaluations; should also include IBM if time/resources permit) • To assess the plans for Kuali Rice against the same metrics developed for the ‘pure’ ESBs (to the degree possible given the pre-development status of Rice). Because Rice is different in starting point and goals from a ‘purist’ ESB, this should be a formative assessment, not a bake-off. Its goal will be to give Mellon and the various Mellon projects a clearer, multidimensional understanding of how Rice will be similar to and different from ESBs, with which each project can reach their own conclusions about the pros/cons of the evolutionary/Rice approach to enterprise integration vs. a purist SOA/ESB approach.
Participating Institutions and Key Individuals: • California State University - Gerry Hanley • Cambridge University- John Norman • Carnegie Mellon University - Chas DiFatta (co-chair) • Carnegie Mellon University - Joel Smith (co-chair) • Cornell University - Sandy Payette • Indiana University - John Walsh • Ithaka- Kevin Guthrie • Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Wilson D’Souza • Stanford University - Lois Brooks • University of British Columbia - Tedd Dodds • University of Chicago - Chad Kranz
Page 1 Enterprise Service Bus Exploratory Effort
Highlights The effort has only begun recently and we have received much interest and participation form the educational community. Thus far the cooperation between the project members has been excellent and is reflected in the milestones of establishing an ESB definition as well as detailed use cases.
Milestones and Deliverables • Startup Phase (Duration: Feb 1 - Feb 21/, Status: complete Feb 22) o Define scope/goals/objectives o Establish common definition of an ESB • Requirements Phase (Duration: Feb 22 - March 28, Status: active) o Developing use cases for key applications that "may" use an ESB o Distilling requirements from use cases o Compiling business and technical requirements matrices o Identification of possible ESB candidates for evaluation • Evaluation Phase (Duration: March 29 - April 27, Status: not started) o Define processes for evaluating ESB candidates o Evaluation of candidates o Checkpoint of progress o Final evaluation • Recommendation Phase (Duration: April 30 - May 18, Status: not started) o Final report
Community • Current Status - See milestones and deliverables above • Contributors - Both participating organizations and others • Users - See Synergy Opportunities below • Plans for development - Informational report for community to use in possible future adoption phase. • Progress toward those plans - On schedule for May deliverable.
Sustainability • Plan - eventually the final report will recommend actions that will spawn other related activities. • No progress to date
Synergy Opportunities with Other Projects The following projects are participating with the effort writing use cases, distilling and drafting requirements, recommendation ESB candidates as well as participating in the evaluation via their organization. • Kuali Student project (UBC) • CSU Digital Marketplace project • Fedora digital repository (Cornell) • Kuali Financial Systems (Indiana) and Kuali Research Admin Student (UBC)
Page 2 Enterprise Service Bus Exploratory Effort
• Sakai (Sakai Foundation/Michigan/Indiana)
Page 3 ESB Evaluation Effort Status
Taking higher education applications to the next level by exposing requirements, identifying candidates and making recommendations of possible next steps to the adoption of an ESB.
Andrew W. Mellon RIT Retreat 2007 Chas DiFatta ([email protected]) Joel Smith ([email protected]) Effort Goal
Identify possible open-source and commercial enterprise service bus product offering candidates that meet with requirements of the Mellon supported Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) efforts and projects Participating Organizations
• California State University • Cambridge University • Carnegie Mellon University • Cornell (Fedora effort) • Indiana University (Rice effort) • Stanford University • Massachusetts Institute of Technology • University British Columbia (Kuali Student) • University of Chicago Establishing an ESB Definition
• Goal: establish the lowest common denominator • Limit the scope: we will not be attempting to define federations of ESB’s • Note: ESB's do not necessarily equate to using only web services ESB Definition
• The integration technology that builds – "service end points" from a fabric of loosely coupled sub-services – multiple independent event or data driven standards- based capability and method engines (the bus) • The bus exposes, integrates, as well as delivers the sub-services that essentially enables service virtualization. ESB Definition Cont.
• The bus enables reliable, any-to-any service delivery of events and data by exposing services as "end points" in which the location of the producer and consumer are hidden from each other through service virtualization. ESB Definition Cont.
• The bus also provides an agile and reconfigurable platform for the execution of processes. This is done by – adding capabilities that aid in composing sub- services together into higher order services – orchestrating the assembly of sub-services as well as execution without having to modify their implementation ESB Definition Cont.
The fundamental internal capabilities and facilities of an ESB which can be both state-full and state-less can consist of but are not limited to the following, • Transformation • Discovery and directory • Transport/filtering/routing • AuthZ/AuthN – Sync and async • Workflow – Support many • Auditing and compliance formats of data (not just XML) • Management • Messaging – Monitoring/logging – Query/response – Diagnostics – Publish/subscribe – Configuration – Push – Alerting/notification ESB Definition Cont.
ESB ! “Silver Bullet” ESB Advantages1 (debatable)
• Faster and cheaper accommodation of existing systems • Increased flexibility; easier to change as requirements change • Standards-based • Scales from point solutions to enterprise-wide deployment (distributed bus) • More configuration rather than integration coding • No central rules engine, no central broker • Incremental changes can be applied with zero down-time; enterprise becomes "refactorable". Faster and cheaper accommodation of existing systems • Increased flexibility; easier to change as requirements change
1 Source Wikipedia ESB Disadvantages2 (debatable)
• Enterprise Message Model is usually mandatory. • Value of the ESB requires many disparate systems to collaborate on message standards. • Can be complex. • Vendor depending, it requires more hardware to run. • New skills needed to configure ESB. • Extra translation layer when compared to regular messaging solutions. • Rarely realizes ROI (Return On Investment) within first few projects; next few projects generally refine messages and services; the fifth project may begin to realize ROI. • For effective implementation, requires a mature IT governance model and a well-defined enterprise strategy to be in place already
2 Source Wikipedia Distributed System Evolution
Generation 1 2 3 4
Service end points
Application
Backend Services
Backend Resources
time Generic ESB Topology
Service End-points
Applications
•Transformation •Directory & Messaging (pub/sub, query/res, push) Discovery •Rules & Workflow Transport Routing/filtering •Storage •Auditing/compliance •Storage •AuthZ/AuthN • Management & Diagnostics Effort Objectives
• Formative evaluation information that can assist any project looking for an Open Source and/or commercial ESB. (i.e. define requirements) • Assess the OSS/commercial ESB space • To assess the plans for Kuali Rice against the same metrics developed for the ‘pure’ ESBs (to the degree possible given the pre-development status of Rice). Effort Phases
• Phase I - Startup (2/1 – 2/21) – complete • Phase II - Requirements (2/22-3/28) – Active, extracting requirements from use cases • Phase III - Evaluation and Analysis (3/29-5/1) – not started • Phase IV - Recommendations (5/1-5/29) – not started Requirements Process
Helper Questions
Technical Requirements Use Cases Use Cases “day in “day in life life before” after” Business Requirements Use Cases
•Digital Market Place (Cal State) •Integrating a “standalone” •Preservation within Institutional Performance review product with Repository/D-Space (Cambridge) SAP HR using an ESB (MIT) •Student Identity Management •Real-time Data integration with (Cambridge) Departmental Systems (MIT) •Student Information System Data •Integrate Course Services with Feeds (CMU) Library, Student, IdM & •Fedora “Big Ingest” (Cornell) Infrastructure (Stanford) •Fedora Scholarly Workbench and •Digital collections process Transactions for Networks of framework (Stanford) Objects (Cornell) •Interdisciplinary Digital •HR Hiring (Indiana) Scholarship (Univ. of Chicago) •Kuali Student (Kuali Student development team) Candidates to Date
• ChainBuilder (Bostech) • Fusion (Oracle) • JBoss ESB (Red Hat) • Mule (Codehaus) • Open ESB (Sun) • Rice (Kuali/Indiana) • ServiceMix (Apache) • WebSphere (IBM, note: Rice University open source effort) Process Feedback Thus Far
Pros: • Have the right mix leaders and thinkers Cons: • Day jobs can interfere • Very aggressive time line • It takes work: the devil’s in the details Funding
• CMU funding effort thus far • Ithaka has supplied the IT resources – Mailing lists – Wiki • Soliciting funding from Mellon for – Evaluation and analysis phase – Recommendation phase ESB Evaluation Effort Status
Taking higher education applications to the next level by exposing requirements, identifying candidates and making recommendations of possible next steps to the adoption of an ESB.
Andrew W. Mellon RIT Retreat 2007 Chas DiFatta ([email protected]) Joel Smith ([email protected])
Fedora Project (start date 2001)
URL: www.fedora.info
Project Goals :
The overriding goal of the Fedora Project is to provide robust open-source repository software and related services to enable the creation of innovative systems for scholarly communication, digital libraries, institutional repositories, publishing, e-scholarship, e- science, and archives. At its core Fedora software provides a state of the art repository service, along with other services to address the full lifecycle of information - from creation/ingest, to dissemination/sharing, and management/preservation. The Fedora Project has been very agile in adapting its software to new trends, for example it has successfully integrated semantic technologies (e.g., RDF) into the repository architecture, which has positioned it well for use in collaborative and “web 2.0” application contexts.
A major goal of Fedora over the next two years is to provide “enterprise-grade” repository-centric software to support scholarly communication. Functional requirements that drive this goal include (1) the ability to support flexible, configurable scholarly workflows in a manner that is well-integrated with the repository, (2) the ability to ensure integrity in the process of collaborative authoring and editing, (3) the ability to reliably manage digital compositions that are “graphs” of related digital objects. We are evolving Fedora’s service-oriented architecture to fit with well-known architectural patterns, in particular “Message-oriented middleware” and “Enterprise service bus.”
Another major goal is sustainability. In support of this we are evolving the Fedora Project into a non-profit organization, Fedora Commons, that will continue the Fedora mission to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, and preserve digital resources upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage; to provide open-source software that integrates key functionality for supporting the full lifecycle of digital information.
Leading Institutions: Cornell University and University of Virginia
Sandy Payette email: [email protected] Co-Director, Fedora Project URL: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/payette Researcher, Cornell Information Science Cornell University
Thornton Staples email: [email protected] Co-Director, Fedora Project Director Digital Library R&D, Alderman Library University of Virginia
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Project Highlights:
1. Notable installations – to show the breadth of use of Fedora, we highlight a few key projects in different communities. In the arts and humanities notables are: University of Virginia, Tufts/Perseus, Indiana University/ EVIA, and the Arts and Humanities Data Service (UK). In the sciences, we note the Max Planck Society’s e-scholarship system (both science and humanities) and the PLoS ONE open access journal system. In the education domain, we note the NDSL which has created the Fedora-based semantic digital library and promotes a collaborative “web 2.0” approach to educational technologies. Also, OhioLINK’s “Digital Resource Commons” focuses on enabling collaboration and sharing of digital resources across all higher education in the state of Ohio. For institutional repositories, we note the Australian ARROW project which is a cooperative project of many institutions to collect, provide access to, and preserve all research output of the Australian universities. 2. Fedora Architecture Summit – the Fedora project is transitioning to a more open process to facilitate direct community participation in the design and development process. On March 14-16, 2007 a group of 15 invited community architects met at the first summit to define new system requirements for Fedora and commit to working with the core development team in achieving its upcoming goals. The summit was major success and all participants will become ontributors or committers to the design and development of future releases of Fedora. 3. Fedora Commons – a new non-profit organization is being set up to be the future home of the Fedora Project. This is described in more detail in the Sustainability section below.
Milestones and Deliverables Last 12 months
1. Release of Fedora 2.2 – this was a significant release that is a first step in positioning Fedora to fit within a standard “enterprise system” environment. This includes a complete repackaging of the Fedora source and binary distribution so that Fedora can now be installed as a standalone web application (.war) in any web container. A new installer application makes it easy to setup and run Fedora. Fedora now uses Servlet Filters for authentication. To support digital object integrity, the Fedora repository can now be configured to calculate and store checksums for datastream content. This can be done globally, or on selected datastreams. The Fedora API also provides the ability to check content integrity based on checksums. The RDF-based Resource Index has been tuned for better performance. Also, a new high-performing triplestore, backed by Postgres, has been developed that can be plugged into the Resource Index. Fedora contains many other enhancements and bug fixes. 2. New Fedora Search service (GSearch) that can be backed by Lucene or Zebra. The service indexes any datastream or dissemination of digital objects. 3. New Fedora Journaling Service that can be used to create mirror or replica repositories to support repository availability, load balancing, backup and recovery. Has proven very effective with large NSDL repository.
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Next 12 months
1. Enterprise Service Bus evaluation with other RIT projects
2. Messaging service in Fedora framework to support service integration and position for Fedora enterprise-orientation.
3. Workflow engine in Fedora framework especially motivated for enabling collaborative content creation, flexible, configurable workflows, advanced process orchestration, and flexible dissemination and publication of results.
4. Preservation services in Fedora framework (with Rutgers)
5. Standard transaction support for Fedora repository service (XA compliance)
6. Sharable way to register “content models” for different types of Fedora objects
7. Improved support for extremely large datastreams (datasets, JPEG2000)
8. New way to have dynamic “views” on digital objects (see: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/payette/fedora/designs/cmda/)
9. Operational Fedora Commons non-profit organization, with core leadership, plus community architecture council and community requirements councils
Community
1. Growing and active international user community. Over past two years we have seen significant growth in the number of institutions that are adopting Fedora. The awareness of the project and the potential of the software has become substantial among universities, libraries, research centers, archives, publishers, and national infrastructure initiatives. 2. The community has also continued to take the lead in organizing a series of user conferences worldwide. Over the last year these have included: a UK user meeting, sponsored by the National Library of Wales in October of 2005; an Australian user meeting sponsored by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) in January of 2006; and the second North American user meeting sponsored by the University of Virginia Library in June of 2006. In all of these meetings it has been clear that the level of interest in Fedora is very high. 3. The Fedora Project sponsored and organized the most recent and largest community event, which was the Fedora user conference held in conjunctions with Open Repositories 2007 (January). A high quality program highlighted numerous mature and innovative Fedora-based projects both in the Fedora session, and the general conference sessions. 4. Community contributions - Members of the Fedora community have contributed significant new components to Fedora that are now available as part of Fedora
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2.2. To support replication and mirroring of repositories, Jim Blake of the NSDL at Cornell has contributed a new Journaling module that will replay every management transaction on a repository into a following repository. Gert Schmeltz Pedersen of the Danish Technical University has contributed a configurable search service (GSearch) that can be configured to index datastreams and disseminations of digital objects. GSearch is pluggable with either the Lucene or Zebra search engines. Aaron Birkland of NSDL teamed up with the Fedora Development Team in creating the new triplestore for Fedora, known as MPTStore. 5. The Fedora wiki was made available and the community has been active with it. The Fedora wiki provides a collaborative environment for both the Fedora developers and Fedora community to exchange information and ideas about a wide range of Fedora-related topics including the Fedora architecture, Fedora documentation, Fedora software, Fedora-related conferences, and Fedora-related news events.
Sustainability
Plan Fedora Commons, a new non-profit organization, is being established to provide a permanent home for Fedora Project. The new organization will focus on outreach and community building in the following target areas: scholarly communication; digital libraries and collections (libraries/museums), education, and e-science. The new organization will provide technical leadership for evolving and developing the Fedora software, and will create councils as the means that community members will participate in requirements, design, development, and prioritization. It will focus both on technology and on outreach to building strong, committed communities to help sustain Fedora.
We are seeking startup funding from the Moore Foundation to enable the organizational and technical framework necessary to develop sustainable Fedora open-source software technologies. Specific measures of success include: (1) increasing the number of installations of the Fedora Commons system worldwide, (2) catalyzing the Fedora community with the result of increasing the numbers of institutions that commit to Fedora by providing human resources (architects and programmers) to work on maintaining and evolving the Fedora system, (3) attracting and securing new sources of income to ensure a sustainable business model for the Fedora Commons organization. We propose to increase the number of institutions that commit to sustaining the Fedora Commons organization by 100% per year for 4 years, as measured by the number of institutions that: (1) provide human resources to help maintain and evolve the Fedora Commons open source software, (2) offer gifts and monetary donations, or (3) pay dues to partake of the benefits and services provided by Fedora Commons.
Progress 1. Incorporation of Fedora Commons 501c3 (done - filed in NYS) 2. Board of Directors (done)
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3. Application for 501c3 status (in progress) 4. New proposal to the Moore Foundation for startup funding for Fedora Commons (in progress; preparing for April submission) 5. Fedora Architecture Summit (held March 14-16, 2007) is a precursor to a technical architecture council in the new organization. Summit brought together group of 15 community architects to share in the definition and prioritization of new system requirements for Fedora. Also, bring individuals and institution into the development process as contributors or committers. This was the first step to more community participation in Fedora software development and community ownership in the Fedora software.
Synergy with other projects: There is the potential for Fedora to fulfill a key part of an overall enterprise system vision for higher education, where Fedora provides repository services for scholarly communication, plus related services to facilitate collaboration, integrity, and preservation around scholarly objects. We can see many integration possibilities with Sakai. We can also see natural integration with Kuali in the area of repositories. The VUE project is already integrated with Fedora, and a Tufts architect participated in the recent Architecture Summit.
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Fedora
Filling the “Sweet Spot ” in the Information Landscape
Sandy Payette Co-Director, Fedora Project Researcher, Cornell Information Science Fedora is enabling technology for…
Scholarly Workbenches New Models of Publication
Article
Annotation Data
Collaborative Information Spaces Museums and Education Must avoid the pitfalls of ignoring the underpinnings of our exciting new applications…
Scholarly Applications Digital Libraries Web 2.0 Applications
Fedora provides flexible, robust repository underpinnings to enable management, integrity and longevity of scholarly, cultural, and scientific information. Fedora – Core Services Integration
• Information Networks • Digital Objects • Relate Objects Repository • Manage • Contextualize • Access • Inference Semantic • Versioning • Query • Storage
Enterprise Preservation • Integrity • Monitoring • Workflow • Alerting • Messaging • Migration • Transactions • Replication Fedora Basics – Digital Objects, Repositories, Semantic Technology
• Flexible Digital Object Model, with versioning • Stable and scalable XML-based storage • Simple web service interfaces to manage and access information • Focus on interoperability, integrity, longevity of information • RDF index of repository facilitates powerful query/discovery
XML-based Digital Object Store RDF-based Repository Index
Relationships
Core and custom properties
Dublin Core Generic, Flexible Building Blocks: Digital Objects with Relationships Use Case: scholarly objects and annotation in the humanities
yy:certifies URI-55 URI-100 scholarly objects
tter PID-2 annotationOf sPartLe PID-11 ha PID-3 text h sCon as vide Pa pro rtD PID-10 iag ram PID-1 amazon e-commerce Service
museum objects commercial web content Fedora Community Arts and Humanities Sciences
Education Status in a Nutshell
• Fedora 2.2 Released •1st Architecture Summit – Packaged as .war – 15 community invitees – Selective versioning – First step toward – Search Service collaborative design and –Replication Service dldevelopmen ttidt outside core team –Checksums – New system requirements – New scalable triplestore – Shared prioritization •Next – Commitment to co- – Enterprise orientation develop – Dynamic service binding – Fedora Commons non-profit org Fedora Timeline
2001 2005 Now Q4 2007 Q2 2009 2010 2011 onward
Fedora Phase 1 and 2 Core Repository Semantic Technologies Service Framework
Fedora Enterprise Workflow Engine and Supporting Tools Message-Oriented Middleware and ESB Scholarly Middleware positioning
Fedora Commons Non-Profit Technical: Evolve Semantic-Repo-Service Platform Community Building: Foster and Outreach Business Model: Secure ongoing funding sources Fedora Web Site www.fedora.info
Community Open Source Tools www.fedora.info/tools
Fedora Wiki http://www.fedora.info/wiki The FLUID Project Start date: April 2007
The FLUID Project is an ambitious but critically important project to boost the user experience in academic community source projects and other web applications. It is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.
The project will develop a living library of robust, usable, accessible UI components, which can be utilized, contributed to, and evolved by the community. This will facilitate more rapid and effective development of both tools and user interfaces within community source projects; it will improve the user interface of the applications; and, it will help address the diverse needs represented within higher education.
To this end, FLUID will create a user interface architecture based on existing standards that enables the creation and consistent use of modular, reusable, and swappable user interface components. These components will be integrated across several community source applications including Sakai, uPortal, and Kuali Student.
FLUID will:
• Facilitate more rapid and effective development of both tools and user interfaces within community source projects • Improve the user interface of the applications • Help address the diverse needs represented within education, including needs related to ability, language, culture, discipline and institutional conventions
The project will also develop and implement processes to improve the knowledge, expertise, coordination, design and development of user interface and user experience within academic software communities.
Project URL http://fluidproject.org
Project Goals
The FLUID project will:
• Create an architectural framework and the development tools to support modular, flexible and transformable user interfaces within community and open source projects, • Define community processes to support the implementation of this architecture within several target community source projects, including Sakai, uPortal, and Kuali Student • Create interaction design resources including usability reviews, heuristic analyses, design models, and UI design patterns within these projects as well as the Moodle CMS • Build tools and processes to design, develop and test modular, sharable UI components • Provide mechanisms to share and iteratively refine UI components within community source and other open source software projects • Recruit and delegate individuals with UI design and development expertise for community source projects • Offer educational and consulting support for individuals in positions where design is only one aspect of their duties (through U-Camps) • Build bridges between the design and development communities through adoption and modeling of best practices in software design and development adapted to the unique constraints of the open source environment • Provide community supports for testing, refining, sharing and repurposing quality UI components.
Partners & Participants
Core Partners • University of Toronto • University of California, Berkeley • University of British Columbia • University of Cambridge • York University
Participating Institutions • Michigan State University • Open University • University of Colorado • University of Maryland • University of Michigan • University of Wisconsin
Participating Software Projects • Kuali Student • Moodle • Sakai • uPortal
Funding • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Research in Technology
Highlights
For the academic community source software initiatives participating in the project FLUID will achieve the following outcomes or objectives, to: - make it possible to delegate UI development to skilled UI designers and developers and easily integrate their contributions into the software project, - simplify UI development for individuals for whom UI design and development is only one part of their duties, - reduce redundant UI development, - enable the pooling of UI resources (designs and UI components) to optimize UI resources, - facilitate more wide-scale testing and refinement and thereby increase the quality of sharable UI components, - promote tool longevity by making it easy to update either the application or the UI independent of the other, - enable the transformation (at runtime or during configuration) of the UI to match a variety of user or user community needs, - improve the consistency of UI design across applications and tools, - enable fast and efficient translation and culturally appropriate reconfiguration of interfaces for internationalization, - provide a consistant user experience across and within applications for any given individual.
This will benefit the broad diversity of academic institutions in that it will: - save time and resources in training and user support, - encourage broader use and faster adoption of academic software, - support diverse disciplinary needs, - facilitate consistency across multiple applications deployed within an institution, - enable novel pedagogical practices (e.g., use of mobile devices), - speed-up and enable translation of the interface into other languages, - facilitate adjustment of the interface and user experience to accommodate cultural needs and preferences, - provide an agile platform for innovation in pedagogy, research and administration, - save time and resources in updating software applications, and - assist in achieving legislative and policy commitments to equal access.
Planned Deliverables for 2007
Community
Community Resources These are early days for the FLUID Project, and our first priority is to encourage community involvement in the project. To this end, we are setting up a range of communication and collaboration tools, which will serve as the central conduit for project activities.
This includes: • A suite of community mailing lists, including fluid-work, the combined forum for user experience and development discussion. • A source control repository, wiki, and issue database for tracking project development status • Breeze for remote collaboration and videoconferencing • Ongoing improvement of our new web site, which was recently launched at http://fluidproject.org
Development Status Development will begin early and in an iterative fashion, providing small and immediate benefits to our partner communities. For the first few months, The FLUID Project roadmap entails a significant amount of research and evaluation of existing presentation technologies. This work will be done in collaboration with the user experience goals of our partner projects, and we intend to design and develop several proof-of-concept implementations of UI components early in the project. User experience research and design activities will focus on creating personas, scenarios, and user interface design for these initial components.
Early project deliverables include: • Creation of personas and scenarios for resource uploading and organization • Refactoring of Sakai Image Gallery tool to support “FLUIDization” • Development of a file picker and a file/folder organization component for the Sakai Image Gallery • Development of a file/folder organization component for the uPortal RSS Reader
Sustainability
FLUID is unlike any other Mellon funded community source project in that the deliverables are enhancements to other software systems. Potential sustainability strategies include a consolidated fee for a set of community source initiatives including FLUID or a mechanism for seeking support from software initiatives implementing FLUID. The value proposition for these software development initiatives is the opportunity to influence the priorities and direction of the FLUID framework and component library. When software initiatives were surveyed there great interest in some form of certification regarding the accessibility compliance of the UI. There was also interest in directly funding the creation of accessible UI components that met application-specific needs.
Synergy with Other Projects
FLUID is intended to enhance other community sources projects. While we will initially integrate the FLUID components into Sakai, uPortal and Kuali Student (followed by Moodle), the components will be designed to be usable by most Web applications developed in Java or PHP. The wider the participation in FLUID the richer and more functional the library of UI components will be.
Kuali Financial System (KFS)
In early 2005, following the generous grant of $2,500,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and with their separately pledged resources totally more than $4,700,000, the eight founding partners of the Kuali Financial Systems initiative, Cornell University, Indiana University, Michigan State University, San Joaquin Delta College, The University of Arizona, The University of Hawaii, NACUBO and The rSmart Group came together to create a comprehensive suite of functionality to serve the financial system needs of any or all Carnegie Class institutions.
Project Name and Start Date Kuali Financial systems; Mellon grant awarded on March 18th, 2005; formal start of project was July 1, 2005.
Project URLs http://kuali.org/
Brief Description of Project Goals. The Kuali Financial Systems Project is dedicated to meeting two simple goals:
1. Providing and maintaining a richly featured financial system that is designed by, for and of higher education and that recognizes the unique needs of the academy; 2. Doing so without placing undue financial burden on institutions. Given the huge diversion of academic treasury to administrative systems in the past decade, this latter is the driving force that motivates all involved with the Kuali initiative.
Milestones and Deliverables
During the period from July 2005-June 2006, the Kuali Financial Functional Council (KFFC), the Project manager (PM) and the Development Managers (DM) met face to face quarterly in some location to do several things: 1. The KFFC representatives, who had been meeting by phone weekly, came together to iron out any significant functional issues and to formally vote on the next quarter’s scope for the development teams. 2. The DMs met to ensure that each team was adhering to the appropriate standards and to also work through any significant technical hurdles that might have emerged. At this time, any team changes were also evaluated in light of the emerging scope deliberations of the KFFC. 3. The Chair of the KFFC and her team met formally with the PM and the DMs and went over the work scope for the next quarter, making any last changes necessary to balance the Reality Triangle for that period.
In April 2006, the team released the Kuali Test Drive http://kualitestdrive.org/ so that prospective implementing schools could explore both the functionality and look/feel of the proposed Kuali Financial System. This was displayed publicly at the annual NACUBO Conference in July 2006.
At the same time, the KFS teams were completing the development of the Phase I functionality and went into a formal, intensive three month QA phase where all developers and their functional colleagues performed rigorous unit, regression and integration testing of the emerging code. Some of the key QA period activities included: • Code Reviews • Unit Test fixes and increased code coverage • Performance Testing • Regression Testing • Usability and Accessibility improvements • Licensing analysis and acknowledgements • Documentation (specifications and technical) https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULDOC/Functional+Documentation https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULDOC/Technical+Documentation
• Release Packaging • Functional signoff
Deliverables:
On (Friday) October 13, 2006, Kuali Financial Systems (KFS) Release 1.0 was released and made available for download and included the following functionality and components:
1. Code a. Chart of Accounts b. General Ledger c. 22 individual rules-driven financial transactions (E-Docs) d. Kuali Nervous System e. Kuali Enterprise Workflow
2. KFS Release 1.0 Release Notes summarize what is available in the initial release. https://test.kuali.org/confluence/download/attachments/7556/Kuali+Phase+1+Rel ease+Notes.doc?version=4
3. A separate documentation team, led by an individual from Michigan State University and including others from IU and the rSmart Group delivered a comprehensive set of specifications, technical, and user documentation for KFS Release 1.0 https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULDOC/User+Documentation
The KFS Configuration Manager and other colleagues wrote and tested configuration and setup instructions for successful installation of KFS Release 1.0 for institutions that download the software https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULCFG/Test+Server+Setup
4. The KFFC provided Financial Policy Templates for institutions that need them. http://www.kuali.org/resources/policy_templates.shtml
5. Indiana University made available the “Financial Administrator Development Series” development materials for staff with fiduciary responsibilities at higher education institutions. http://www.kuali.org/resources/fad.shtml
6. Provided a complete list of third-party software contributors, acknowledgements, and licensing requirements. https://test.kuali.org/confluence/display/KULDOC/Acknowledgments
Other key KFS events and processes:
Conducted three “Kuali Days” conferences in November 2005, April 2006 and November 2006. The first two were in Indianapolis and featured mostly IU SME and technical experts. The most recent event, in Tucson attracted 200+ paid attendees from 35 individual institutions and for the first time featured SME and technical staff from many of the partner institutions. These sessions provided overviews of the newly released KFS 1.0 software as well as a peek at what is coming in Phase II and beyond. Labs were also provided so that attendees could work “hands on” through real life scenarios in KFS.
CY 2007 Anticipated The Kuali Financial System project has demonstrated an evolution in how to do distributed development for enterprise scale academic software. The role of the KFFC in arbitrating trade-offs in features and priorities has been a remarkable driver of the ultimate implementers of this system being its owners during development. The university officers and senior directors that serve on the Kuali Financial board have been outstanding in working through the challenges and decisions of a 100+ person virtual team.
The chart below provides the latest update on the KFS roadmap. The roadmap represents the reality and priorities of the KFFC in balancing scope (features), time, and resources. This plan will set the next major release for October 2007 to include all modules except Accounts Receivable and Capital Assets which will be in June of 2008. This timeline pushes beyond the planned June 2007 closure date anticipated in the original grant proposal and represents continued contributions of staff time from the KFS schools. Since financial systems have multi-year lead times for planning and are usually implemented by modules, potential adopters already have KFS materials and the core system to engage that work.
Community
Since the KFS inception, the community has conducted three “Kuali Days” conferences in November 2005, April 2006 and November 2006. The first two were in Indianapolis and featured mostly IU SME and technical experts. The most recent event, in Tucson attracted 200+ paid attendees from 35 individual institutions and for the first time featured SME and technical staff from many of the partner institutions. These sessions provided overviews of the newly released KFS 1.0 software as well as a peek at what is coming in Phase II and beyond. Labs were also provided so that attendees could work “hands on” through real life scenarios in KFS.
Sustainability
Kuali Foundation
In May, 2006, The Kuali Foundation was formed as a non-profit entity and filed for 501c3 status with the IRS. The initial members were the six founding partners and the NACUBO organization. The Kuali Foundation – patterned after the Sakai Foundation – will hold the copyright for the KFS software and other related administrative system projects.
In July, 2006, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) and three of its constituent campuses (UC Davis, UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara) were invited to join the KFS initiative as investing partners and tendered $1,000,000 in staff and cash to the Board. The UC partners selected one of their members to join the KFS Project Board as their voting member. http://kuali.org/assets/pdf/UCKualiAnnouncement.pdf
The Kuali Foundation also announced that IBM and Huron Consulting would join rSmart as Kuali Commercial Affiliates to provide consulting and support for the open source Kuali software. http://kuali.org/news/pr-102506-overall.shtml. rSmart has announced their “Kuali Appliance” as a pre-configured IBM server that can be installed with a ready to use Kuali Financial System for local setup. http://rsmart.com/news/rsmart-launches- kuali-financial-system-appliance. Strathmore University in Kenya has already contracted with rSmart to implement the Kuali 1.0 system.
Synergy Opportunities with Other Projects
Kuali Research Administration (KRA)
In July, 2006, four of the KFS founders – Cornell, Indiana, Michigan State, and the U. of Arizona – again pooled their resources with the support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a community source version of a Research Administration System. The $4M project includes MIT and its existing COEUS system, and the doubling down of investment in the Kuali model of building software together from four of the founders speaks to the confidence of the institutions in this model.
Kuali Rice
Growing out of the KFS work, the Kuali Rice effort will provide an enterprise class middleware suite of integrated products that will allow both Kuali and non-Kuali applications to be built in an agile fashion, such that developers will be able to react to end-user business requirements in an efficient and productive manner, so that they can produce high quality business applications.
Rice will be built with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts in mind, leveraging technology concepts such as web services and enterprise service bus features built on top of open standards such as SOAP, REST, WS-I, and more. Specifically, end developers will be able to build robust systems with common enterprise workflow functionality allowing for business process orchestration, customizable and configurable user interfaces with a clean and universal look and feel, and general notification features to allow for a consolidated list of work "action items". In addition, the Rice team recognizes the current day issues regarding system security and will provide integrated yet customizable solutions for data encryption, authentication, authorization, and user and group management.
All of this adds up to providing a re-usable development framework that encourages a simplified approach to developing true business functionality as modular applications.
Project Description
Rice is the name for the Kuali based enterprise class middleware project that is intended to enable Rapid Application Development. This suite of architecture components will allow for:
1. Exposure of services via the Kuali Service Bus (KSB) which can be consumed by other Rice applications in a SOAP or REST style 2. Enterprise class workflow for business transactions 3. A common look and feel 4. Dynamic user interface generation with flexible configuration capabilities 5. Built-in security integration with support for data encryption, pluggable authentication, and pluggable authorization 6. Baseline services for enterprise notification processing 7. A baseline approach and methodology for efficient development of Rice enabled applications
After an institution makes an investment in Rice enabled development, they can expect all of the above features and as a result – software development teams can concentrate on delivering business functionality rather than complex technical solutions to problems. The complex technical solutions will be addressed, but at the framework level so that each application or service that adopts the framework will have the ability to interoperate with little to no complexity with other services exposed by other applications.
Kuali Rice
As an evolutionary approach to the development of Kuali based software, the Kuali Rice project was started to enable future Kuali related projects to take advantage of the re- usable software that had been built during the construction of the Kuali Financial System. The initial charge of this project is to extract the useful pieces of software that were created for the Financial System and generalize those out into a separate standalone architecture that could be used to build the Kuali Research Administration project and other future Kuali and non Kuali projects. The Kuali Rice project’s primary goal is to ensure interoperability between the various Kuali projects and to ensure a common underlying architecture that can be used to aid in the development and evolution of the Kuali projects. The Kuali Rice team’s primary responsibility is to the Kuali projects, however their deliverables could be repurposed to be used to aid the development of other systems.
Project Name and Start Date Kuali Rice; formal start of project was February 1, 2007 as an evolutionary reaction to the need for multiple independent Kuali projects to be constructed.
Project URLs http://rice.kuali.org/
Brief Description of Project Goals The Kuali Rice Project is dedicated to meeting two simple goals:
1. Providing and maintaining an integrated set of middleware to be used by Kuali projects to maintain consistency across Kuali projects and to allow for reuse of common services across the Kuali projects and other systems; 2. Providing a generalized framework for systems development that enhances productivity of software developers and provides a common set of services to be used by those applications, whether they are purposed for Higher Education, Humanities, Libraries, etc.
Milestones and Deliverables
Milestones:
Project proposed and accepted by Kuali Foundation Board during the Kuali Days retreat in October 2006, as a means to position ourselves to be able to achieve the development goals of the Kuali Research Administration and future Kuali initiatives.
Initial resource commitments tendered to the project by Cornell University, University of Arizona, and Indiana University. Still seeking additional commitments to speed up the development of the project and increase the project’s ability to deliver as needed.
Deliverables:
The first Kuali Rice deliverable will be a distribution of the extracted Kuali Nervous System components from the Kuali Financial System, integrated with Kuali Enterprise Workflow, a Kuali Service Bus, and the Kuali Notification System. This deliverable is expected to be available for use for Kuali Research Administration on 7/1/2007 and will be considered Kuali Rice version 1.0.
In addition to the availability of this project for use in Kuali Research Administration, as it is being extracted from the Kuali Finance System the Finance System will be retrofitted with Kuali Rice so that both projects will be using the same underlying infrastructure software.
Scope of Deliverables:
1) Kuali Enterprise Workflow - Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW) provides a common routing and approval engine that facilitates the automation of electronic processes across the enterprise. The workflow product was built by and for higher education, so it is particularly well suited to route human mediated electronic activities across departmental boundaries. Workflow facilitates distribution of processes out into the organizations to eliminate paper processes and shadow feeder systems. In addition to facilitating routing and approval workflow can also automate process to process related flows. Each process instance is assigned a unique identifier that is global across the organization. Workflow keeps a permanent record of all processes and their participants. KEW takes into account the sometimes very complex rules that departments or schools may wish to use internally and allows each to set their own.
2) Kuali Nervous System - The Kuali Nervous System (KNS) is a software development framework aimed at allowing developers to quickly build business applications in an efficient and agile fashion. KNS is an abstracted layer of "glue" code that provides developers easy integration with the other Rice components. In this scope, KNS provides features to developers for dynamically generating user interfaces that allow end users to search, view details about records, interact electronically with business processes, and much more. KNS adds visual, functional, and architectural consistency to any system that is built with it, helping to ensure easier and more efficient maintainability of your software.
3) Kuali Service Bus – The Kuali Service Bus (KSB) provides standards based facilities for deployment, monitoring, tracking, and consuming enterprise services exposed by applications. In addition the Kuali Service Bus allows for both synchronous and asynchronous integration with services and provides standards based message oriented middleware capabilities that allow for either a push or publish/subscribe based model. The Kuali Service Bus will be an integral piece of the architecture for Kuali as it will allow for Kuali and non Kuali based applications to make use of services exposed onto the bus by Kuali applications. Therefore if KRA needs to integrate with a service from KFS it will be able to do so, in a purely services oriented architecture based model allowing for loose coupling between Kuali systems and other systems that must integrate with those systems. In addition to the facilities for use by java based applications, the Kuali Service Bus will provide standards based facilities for deploying services as web services so that the services can be created and consumed by differing technology stacks.
4) Kuali Enterprise Notification - Kuali Enterprise Notification (KEN) acts as a broker for all university business related communications by allowing end-users and other systems to push informative messages to the campus community in a secure and consistent manner. All notifications are processed asynchronously and are delivered to a single list where other messages such as workflow related items (KEW action items) also reside. In addition, end-users can configure their profile to have certain types of messages delivered to other end points such as email, mobile phones, etc.
Community
Since the Kuali Rice project is an integral part of the KFS and KRA systems, the Kuali Days events sponsored by the Kuali Foundation will be used to grow the community around this software. In addition to the Kuali Days events, Kuali Rice will be presented at EDUCAUSE, JA-SIG, AACRO, JISC, and other events to raise community awareness.
Sustainability
Kuali Foundation
In May, 2006, The Kuali Foundation was formed as a non-profit entity and filed for 501c3 status with the IRS. The initial members were the six founding partners of the Kuali Financial System and the NACUBO organization. The Kuali Foundation – patterned after the Sakai Foundation – will hold the copyright for the Kuali Rice software and other related administrative system projects. Kuali Rice Project March 29, 2007 What is Kuali Rice
An evolutionary approach to leverage economies of scale for development of Kuali and non Kuali based applications Provides a set of reusable services and commonly needed middleware to allow for rapid application development of specific applications Gives developers a standards based approach to solving common development problems What is Kuali Rice
Set of reusable middleware services Kuali Enterprise Workflow Kuali Nervous System Kuali Service Bus Kuali Enterprise Notification Quick review of our goals
Provide common framework for consistent development across Kuali Projects Creation of a development approach that can be used to develop applications at any institution or department Provide stable underlying infrastructure to reduce overall cost of development of arbitrary applications Project Scope
A Quick View of our Project Scope http://rice.kuali.org Project Report: Kuali Student Service System
INTRODUCTION
The Kuali Student Service System program (Kuali Student, for short) will deliver a new generation student system that will be developed through the Community Source process, delivered through service-oriented methodologies and technologies, and sustained by an international community of institutions and firms.
Since September 2006, we have been working under a Mellon Foundation Officer’s Grant to create a project proposal for a full-function student system. We anticipate completion of the full proposal this spring, for decision at the Foundation’s board meeting of September 2007.
THE CASE FOR ACTION
Student systems are the most complex example of the various enterprise systems used by colleges and universities around the world. They are also closer to the core academic mission of our institutions than any other ‘administrative’ system; after all, students are our core business. Flexible student systems, combined with imaginative business policies and processes, can be a source of comparative advantage for an institution.
A recent survey of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) illustrated a high demand for improved student systems functionality: 80% of the approximately 500 respondents were involved in, contemplating, or had recently completed a major upgrade to their SIS.
In 2006, a feasibility study was funded through an Officer’s Grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and led by Brad Wheeler, CIO, Indiana University. The study revealed a high level of interest in and readiness for a community source student system. It also featured a review of the marketplace describing a wide variety of products and firms that provide certain components of a full-function student system, and a very limited number of options for institutions that seek a single vendor solution (the market is highly consolidated). Institutions seeking a ‘best of breed’ approach to student systems are confronted with the challenge of individual applications that do not necessarily share a common architecture or consistent standards.
The success of other community source initiatives, and the creation of related organizations such as the Kuali Foundation and the Sakai Foundation, provides evidence that the community source process can create and sustain complex administrative systems that meet the needs of colleges and universities.
Kuali Student is a complex, ambitious project that is prepared to face functional and technical challenges. The key functional challenges will be to commit to a compelling functional vision, to deliver this functionality in Kuali Student, and to take full advantage of this functionality in each institution. The key technical challenges include evaluating, selecting and implementing technologies that will result in a powerful, flexible, and cost effective system.
VISION
The vision of Kuali Student, more so than the underlying technology, illustrates why we refer to it as a next-generation student system. We envision a system that supports students and other users by anticipating their needs; helps them to make choices, set goals
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 1 of 17 Project Report: Kuali Student Service System and track their progress; and reduces the time it takes them to complete administrative tasks. Kuali Student will support a wide range of learners and learning activities, in a wide range of institutions, and make it as simple as possible to provide support for new types of learners, activities and programs. We will support a wide range of academic and related business processes, including those that cross departments & systems, in ways that work best for each institution, and make it easier, faster and less expensive to change existing processes and introduce new ones. We will build a system that complements human interactions, releases staff from repetitive clerical and administrative tasks, and allows them to provide higher value support and services to students, faculty, and other people who need them.
PROJECT GOALS
The specific objectives of each Founding institution for participating in the development of Kuali Student will be very different. However, the common objectives of the Kuali Student Program can be stated as follows: • To develop a next generation Student Service System architecture that follows the principles of Service-Orientation, implemented using Web Services. • To develop the Service Contract specifications for the services required to implement the Student Service System. This will enable development work to be completed by a large community, not just the originating Founders. • To develop, and release for implementation, a software product consisting of a set of Services that have been defined to be the core functions of a next generation Student Service System - Kuali Student. • To define and publish standards for development that can be used by other members of the community to develop Services that are not within the scope of the core product. • To ensure the core Services of Kuali Student are successfully implemented by the Founding Institutions. • To promote the adoption and implementation of Kuali Student by a wide variety of educational institutions – within North America and internationally. • To build a community of interest that will sustain future maintenance, enhancement and development of the product. • To define product development and support processes that will be used to assist the community to implement the software and to provide operational support for the product. • To continue to evolve the technology and architecture of Kuali Student over time to keep up with new industry standards, tool releases and trends.
MILESTONES AND DELIVERABLES – PAST 12 MONTHS
! Creation of founding board – November 2006 ! Draft Program Charter – November 2006, ongoing updates ! Draft Resource Estimates – February 2007 ! Vision Statement and Functional Principles – February 2007 ! Draft System Scope and Application Architecture – February 2007 ! Technical Principles – February 2007 ! Institution-level Business Case template – March 2007 ! Workshops o Four SOA workshops held March, July, September, November 2006 o Board workshops held November 2006, February 2007 o Functional team workshops held December 2006, February 2007
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o Technical team workshops held December 2006, February 2007 (upcoming April 2007) ! Presentations o EDUCAUSE – October 2007 o Sun Microsystems Education & Research Conference – February 2007 o Canadian University CIOs – March 2007 o AACRAO Business Meeting – March 2007 o AACRAO Technical Conference – pending, July 2007 ! Meetings o Board, Functional Steering Committee and Technical Steering Committee each meet weekly via video/audio conference.
MILESTONES AND DELIVERABLES – CY 2007
! Final Program Charter signed by all founders – June 2007 ! Grant proposal to Mellon Foundation – July for Board September 2007 ! Refined Application Architecture – August 2007 ! Refined Technical Architecture – August 2007 ! Completed Service Modeling for Release 1 – March 2008 ! Development Infrastructure/Platform – March 2008 ! Proof of Concept Pilot – March 2008
PARTICIPATING INSTITUTIONS
Founding Institutions Key People Carnegie Mellon University Joel Smith, CIO Bill Elliott, VC Student Affairs San Joaquin Delta College Lee Belarmino, CIO Chris Coppola, rSmart University of British Columbia Ted Dodds, CIO Brian Silzer, AVP & University Registrar University of California, Berkeley Shel Waggener, CIO Susy Susie Castillo-Robson University of Maryland, College Park Jeff Husskamp, CIO Bill McLean, AVP Budget and Finance
Founding Organizations Key People AACRAO – Association of American Jerry Bracken, Vice President College Registrars and Admissions Officers
Partners Key People Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jerry Grochow, CIO
Founding institutions are required to make all of the following commitments to the program: • Invest a minimum of $1 million per year for five 5 years (in a mutually agreed mixture of people and cash);
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• Be guided by the Kuali Student vision and ensure the product we develop adheres to that vision; • Develop expertise in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), use service oriented methodologies in designing the system, and develop software as web services; • Implement most or all of the Kuali Student system applications; • Be an advocate for the vision, the program, and the community source process.
AACRAO is a special type of founder that is contributing business expertise, coordination, and significant credibility to the program. The AACRAO organization is not expected to provide founder-level resources. It provides a gentle form of non-exclusive advocacy for Kuali Student.
Kuali Student program partners are expected to make some but not necessarily all of these same commitments, including reduced resource commitments or developing ‘add ons’ that are not part of the scope of work undertaken by the founders. Our first partner, MIT, has generously provided two senior (and very effective) FTEs to the project. Informal discussions are ongoing with various other potential partners as part of the community building process.
FUNCTIONAL PRINCIPLES
The Functional Steering Committee has refined and enriched the foundational vision of Kuali Student through a set of Functional Principles. We believe that a broad and compelling vision is necessary to ensure that Kuali Student delivers all the potential benefits of a next generation system. The vision sets out to achieve the following goals:
1. To support students and other users by anticipating their needs; help them to make choices, set goals and track their progress; and reduce the time it takes them to complete administrative tasks. 2. To support a wide range of learners and learning activities, in a wide range of institutions, and make it as simple as possible to provide support for new types of learner, activities and programs. 3. To support a wide range of academic and related business processes, including those that cross departments and systems, in ways that work best for each institution, and make it easier, faster and less expensive to change existing processes and introduce new ones. 4. To provide highly scalable support for users and the execution of processes, so that high levels of service can be provided, with very low incremental increases in cost, to an increasing number of users, each of whom has access to a growing range of choices and services. 5. To build a system that complements human interactions, releasing staff from repetitive clerical and administrative tasks, and allows them to provide higher value support and services to students, faculty, and other people who need it.
We have identified the following seven elements as critical in the design of the system to ensure that the functionality provided in Kuali Student delivers the vision:
1. New, high level entities that make it easier to introduce new programs and approaches to learning; 2. A concierge function that helps students by using information about their plans and accomplishments, available resources, and the institutions rules and opportunities;
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 4 of 17 Project Report: Kuali Student Service System
3. The use of workflow and rules engines to implement and improve business processes, make the system highly scalable, and allow the rapid investigation and evaluation of multiple scenarios, using agreed rules and criteria; 4. The ability to configure the system, using the workflow and rules engines, to support processes developed at each institution, rather than the “best practices” that the system developers choose to support; 5. A modular, loosely coupled, standards based architecture, that will allow Kuali Student to work with existing and new applications; 6. Appropriate access to data and information, with services to make it simple for users to find and use the information they need, when they need it, in the form that is most useful to them; and 7. A system design that supports internationalization, i.e. the use of different languages and currencies, and provision for different educational models.
Further descriptions of each of these design elements may be found in Appendix A.
TECHNICAL PRINCIPLES
The Technical Steering Committee has developed a set of ten principles to guide the technical development of the Kuali Student system and to serve as a reference throughout the full lifecycle of the project. While these principles are open to amendments as the project progresses and as lessons are learned, every effort should be made to preserve these ten guiding principles. As a means of preserving these guiding principles, the Change Management Process will be used to amend this document and to make exceptions to the principles while building Kuali Student.
Service Oriented Architecture 1. SOA Methodology: Kuali Student will be based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the benefits of which lie in the promotion of reuse, autonomy, loose coupling, and up-front design via service contracts
2. Web Services: Web services, that is, SOAP and WSDL (and by use of these standards, XML), will be used to implement SOA. The advantages of Web services are their simplicity, their universality, and the fact that they are platform neutral.
3. Standards-Based: Kuali Student will be an open standards-based product, and will use open standards compliance as a key evaluation point in product selection.
4. Separate Governance Process for Service Contracts: Service contracts are the business assets of an SOA-based system, are the public definition of the system, and must be the most stable part of the system. They are governed separately and differently from that of typical development artifacts in that the governing body’s members come from both business and the technical teams.
Component Abstraction SOA provides an effective means of abstracting layers through the use of Web services; business rules, BPEL, and workflow engines; a portal; and through an ORM framework. 5. Abstraction of Business Processes and Business Rules 6. Abstraction of Presentation Layer and use of an Open Source Portal 7. Abstraction of the Data Layer
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 5 of 17 Project Report: Kuali Student Service System
Leveraging of Open Source Kuali Student will be built using only open source products for the software stack, infrastructure, and development tools. This does not preclude the use of commercial software for individual implementations. 8. System Will Be Built Entirely On An Open Source Software Stack 9. Infrastructure Will Be Composed Of Existing Open Source Products
Development 10. Java as the Language and Platform of Choice Kuali Student will be written whenever possible in Java, and Java will be the platform of choice. Kuali Student will however, support external and 3rd-party non-Java products and components as long as those components adhere to the Web services standards.
Further descriptions of each of these principles may be found in Appendix B.
COMMUNITY
The focus to date has been on establishing a strong foundation for the program: commitment of founders, program governance, resource estimates, and planning. Our goal is to develop a truly international community around Kuali Student, a goal that is enabled by the standards-based modular approach we are taking.
Informal discussions are ongoing with institutions in the United States and Canada who have expressed interest in the program and represent potential partners and adopters. Without diverting attention or resources from the development work of the founders, additional community-building efforts will be made in the UK and EU during the latter half of 2007, and in Australasia in the first quarter of 2008.
SUSTAINABILITY AND SYNERGY
One of the most desirable and effective mechanism for sustainability will be a robust community of functional and technical leaders and contributors. In addition, we have had very preliminary discussions with a handful of private sector firms around the potential for commercial support. We have made no commitments nor are we working with any commercial partner at this stage.
We envision great potential synergies with other Kuali Foundation projects, particularly in the area of shared architecture, services, and standards. Through UBC, we have a resource commitment to the FLUID project (FLexible User Interface Design). The student-centric, international vision of Kuali Student will benefit from, and should contribute to, next- generation user interface design tools.
PROGRAM PLAN See Figure 1: Program Phases
PROGRAM SCOPE See Figure 2: Application Architecture
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 6 of 17 Project Report: Kuali Student Service System Figure 1. Program Phases
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 7 of 17 Project Report: Kuali Student Service System Figure 2. Application Architecture
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 8 of 17 Appendix A – Functional Design Elements
Design Element I: High level entities
Among the high level entities that will make it possible for Kuali Student to support a wide range of learners and learning activities in a broad range of institutions are:
Person Recognizing people as unique, enduring, individuals who will have various roles, associations and group memberships over time, is critical to eliminating many of the limitations of existing systems. Earlier student systems recognized individuals only in their roles of student, instructor, etc. In Kuali Student, the high level entity is the person, and each person can have one or more roles of student, instructor, etc. Time Most existing student systems use rigid, pre-defined blocks of time such as semesters, terms, and classes, etc., each having fixed start and end dates and/or times. These fit some programs and activities, but not others. They are often difficult to change, and do not easily accommodate non-conforming activities. In Kuali Student the high level entity is the time unit, which can start and end at any date and time (year, month, day, hour and minute). Each time unit has a unique identifier, usually hidden from the user, and some time units (such as classes) can be nested within other units (such as semesters). Recurring units (such as classes) can be defined, as they are now, by their start and end times. Existing standard time blocks fit into this model, and new time units are not constrained by previously defined, standard, units. Learning unit The learning unit concept is borrowed from inventory management. Any learning activity can be a learning unit, with a unique Learning Unit Number, or LUN. Management of existing learning units (programs, specializations, courses, etc.) will be facilitated by giving them LUNs, but the real power of LUNs lies in being able to assign them to learning activities existing systems are not designed to handle. This will allow Kuali Student to be used for functions such as managing all credit and non-credit activities; defining a group of courses as a unique program; or tracking individual contributions by students in particular courses; all things that are difficult or impossible with existing student systems. The way in which learning units can be combined will continue to be defined by program requirements and other applicable rules. Learning result The learning result entity will allow any information about a student’s learning accomplishments to be stored as information in Kuali Student. In addition to the standard learning results, such as grades, learning results can include such things as self declared grades (e.g. student entered high school grades), assessments of meta-skill development, and qualitative evaluations submitted by instructors. Some learning results (e.g. language proficiency assessments) will not be associated with a learning unit, but where applicable, course and program rules will define how lower level learning results are evaluated to derive higher level learning results. For example, scores for essays and assignments can be evaluated to determine course grades, and course grades can be evaluated to determine program or degree completion. Learning plan A learning plan is the current collection of information about a student’s learning accomplishments, activities and intentions. A student’s learning plan will include information about the student’s past and current courses and activities, which could be at the high
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 9 of 17 Appendix A – Functional Design Elements school, college or university level, as well as their intentions, which could be represented by interest expressed in a degree program or major, or registration in a particular program. A student’s learning plan will play an important role in Kuali Student’s ability to deliver truly student-centric support. Learning resources A learning resource is any resource that is required to make learning units available to students. Learning resources include instructors, classrooms, learning delivery systems, and teaching equipment. In many cases, information about these resources will be stored in other systems (GIS, HR, etc.) The learning resource entity will provide a way to link information about these resources to information about learning units stored in Kuali Student.
Design Element II: The Concierge
The concierge function will be the key to making Kuali Student student-centric. The concierge supports students and other users by:
! anticipating their needs ! alerting them to necessary tasks ! presenting information about available choices and courses of action ! helping them make choices, set goals and track their progress ! reducing the time it takes to complete necessary tasks
It uses:
! information about students and their accomplishments, plans and goals ! knowledge of institutional rules, regulations, and learning opportunities ! information about the experiences of other learners in similar or related situations to: ! identify required or recommended actions ! present relevant alternatives sorted according to users’ criteria ! present information about the probability of success, based on the experience of others with similar achievements and goals
Work flow, rules engines, and artificial intelligence techniques (such as expert systems) will be used to analyze possible courses of action and sort the results based on the user’s profile and the probability that a particular course of action will meet the user’s needs and help them achieve their goals.
The concierge will be helpful not only to students, but also to faculty and staff. In addition, the self-service concierge functionality can be easily adapted to guide staff through the provision of in-person service to their customers.
Design Element III: Work flow and rules engines
The use of work flow and rules engine technologies is central to delivering the Kuali Functional vision. Scalability, or the ability to support additional users and processes at low incremental cost, requires that processes are automated, and rules are applied with minimum human intervention.
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 10 of 17 Appendix A – Functional Design Elements
Work flow and rules engines will ensure that Kuali Student is highly scalable, and can be configured for use in a wide range of institutions. It will also ensure that process change, made possible by technological advances, can be implemented more quickly and at lower cost than with current generation systems.
Design Element IV: Support for locally developed processes
A student system supports core business and academic processes, many of which have evolved in each institution to reflect the role of the institution, its learners and programs, and its academic mission. Existing student systems have usually implemented processes in ways that reflect “best practices” agreed to by the institutions involved in the initial development. Differences between institutions mean that processes often have to be customized before a system meets institutional needs. This is usually expensive, and leads to increased maintenance and support costs.
Work flow and rules engines will be used to ensure that Kuali Student can be configured to implement processes in ways that work best at each institution. Work will be required to configure Kuali Student at each institution, but the result will be a close match between what institutions do and what Kuali Student supports.
Design Element V: Modular design
The standards based, loosely coupled, modular design of Kuali Student will deliver the core functionality required in a student system, and will make it possible to use other applications that either enhance included functionality, or add functionality that is not included. One example is the use of a portal application to provide the Kuali Student user interface, which will allow the interface to be configured to suit a wide variety of users, and to present information from other systems.
Service-oriented analysis will identify the core functionality on which higher level processes depend, and a service-oriented architecture will make this functionality available to multiple applications, and to other systems. This will ensure that business and academic processes that cross traditional departments (and systems) can be supported.
The modular design, together with the open source licensing model, will allow both open source and commercial modules to be used in conjunction with Kuali Student. It will also allow Kuali Student modules to be used to enhance existing student systems. The use of standards wherever possible, and the publication of Kuali Student interface definitions, is essential to the formation of a community of developers and vendors who develop applications that work with Kuali Student.
Design Element VI: Appropriate access to information
Appropriate access to information in Kuali Student is critical to all users. Students should be able to explore possible options, and make informed decisions, based on information about rules, regulations, and the experience of other students in similar situations. Faculty and staff need easy extract capabilities and real-time access to a wide range of information to help them manage and plan activities and programs.
Many existing systems make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for all users to have timely access the information they need, in a form that is useful to them. The modular,
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 11 of 17 Appendix A – Functional Design Elements service-oriented design of Kuali Student, together with the delegation of authority to manage users and their roles, memberships, and privileges, will make it possible to give all users appropriate, timely access to information in a form that meets their needs.
Design Element VII: Internationalization
The Kuali student architecture will allow it to be adapted for use outside the United States and Canada, in countries that speak other languages, use other currencies, and have very different educational systems. The modular, service-oriented design, with the use of work flow and rules engines, will help to make this possible. In addition, the system must provide functionality that makes it as easy as possible to change the language in which information is presented, together with the other changes required for use in different countries.
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 12 of 17 Appendix B – Guiding Principles for Technical Architecture
Introduction
An overarching theme of these guiding principles is that they are here to guide. There will be amendments to the principles, and there will be exceptions made. Care needs to be taken however in amending the principles and in making exceptions. In order to ensure that the spirit of the principles is maintained, and that exceptions do not get beyond the ability to manage them, the Change Management Process will be used for any modifications and exceptions. This will ensure a proper level of control, collaboration, and consensus of the stakeholders.
Service Oriented Architecture
Principle 1: SOA Methodology
The first characteristic of Kuali Student is that it is based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Although many Java Enterprise applications are “service” based in that objects are accessed via service interfaces, the SOA approach is different in several respects:
• There is a greater emphasis on the up-front design of entities and service contracts.
• The artifacts of the design phase are entity models and service definitions.
• Services should be autonomous; they are not controlled or constrained by another service and therefore may run remotely. From a development perspective, there will be a strong presumption in favor of building services that can be deployed remotely. There will however be cases where this is impracticable for performance, security, or other reasons.
• Services should be loosely coupled; they are modeled and exposed through an interface that is separate from its implementation. Through loose coupling, services can be implemented in any environment as long at the implementation fulfills the service contract.
• There is a high degree of emphasis placed on the identification of re-useable services.
An example of the benefit of SOA is the design of the authentication system for Kuali Student. By designing services (via service contracts) that are autonomous and loosely coupled it’s possible to plug in any authentication system (e.g., CAS, home-grown, etc.) that implements the system’s service contracts.
Principle 2: Web Services
The preferred implementation of the SOA is web service technology. Web services have the advantages in their simplicity, their universality, and the fact that they are platform neutral. “Web services” means SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Service Definition Language). Apache Axis is a good example of a product that implements these technologies. XML schema is the primary vehicle for expressing entity models and service contracts. In short, "XML is the platform."
Principle 3: Standards Based
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 13 of 17 Appendix B – Guiding Principles for Technical Architecture
Kuali Student will follow open standards wherever feasible. The standards observed will be in the following areas (and others where applicable):
1. The W3C Web services framework (SOAP and WSDL) 2. Kuali Student will follow WS-* standards where they apply (e.g., WS-Security, WS-Transactions, WS-Addressing, etc.). 3. Industry standards such as those supported by PESC-AACRAO 4. Java Community standards such as JSR 168 (Portlet), and JSR 94 (Rules Engine) 5. Internationalization standards
Standards compliance is a key issue in product selection. For example, it is important that the Kuali Student Web-services engine implement the latest SOAP and WSDL standards. A product’s adherence to the latest standards has the additional benefit of freeing the Kuali Student technical team from the constraint of being continuously up-to- date on every change in a standard’s definition.
It’s understood that standards will evolve over the course of the project. While it’s generally a good idea to maintain Kuali Student’s adherence to the latest standards, the technical team should be prudent in its attempts to keep pace with the latest standards as doing so may have a negative impact on delivery of the product.
Principle 4: Separate Governance Process for Service Contracts
Service contracts are business assets of an SOA-based system, are the public definition of the system, and must be the most stable part of the system. They are governed separately and differently from that of typical development artifacts in that the governing body has representation from each service domain, the involved business units, and technical subject matter experts. This body can be decentralized where each unit is responsible for their services and those they want to make available to others, or it can be a centralized body that reviews all new, modified, or retired service contracts, or the organization can be somewhere in between. The governance body’s organization will be specified in the methodology section of the Kuali Student Charter.
The management of service contracts can be extended to external contracts as there may be cases where Kuali Student consumes stable 3rd-party services (such as the validation of addresses by a postal service).
Service contracts created by an institution (i.e., for the purpose of customization or for the consumption of external services, for example) will be maintained by the institution. Service contracts contained in the reference distribution will be maintained by Kuali Student.
Component Abstraction
Principle 5: Abstraction of Business Processes and Business Rules
Business rules and business process logic will be abstracted from the code base.
• Rules engines are the preferred vehicles for abstracting business rules • Workflow and BPEL engines are the preferred vehicles for abstracting business process logic.
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 14 of 17 Appendix B – Guiding Principles for Technical Architecture
The use of rules engines takes the traditional separation of business logic and presentation in an n-tier architecture one step further by externalizing business logic. Changes to business logic can be defined to the system without any programming changes. Routing logic for the workflow engine is also expressed through the rules engine. An important part of the project will involve developing interfaces for the rules engine(s). Rules engine technology also introduces the possibility of artificial intelligence in the system since one of the outputs of a rules engine can be a new set of optimized rules.
The Kuali Student reference distributions will include standard templates for common business practices that may be extended by implementers to meet the particular needs of their institutions. As an example, the template “calculateGPA” could be extended to meet the specific rules of an institution in the calculation of a student’s GPA.
In cases where the business process and business rules vehicles are insufficient there will be clear guidelines on how to abstract business logic in the code (as dictated by the Change Management Process).
Principle 6: Abstraction of Presentation Layer and Use of an Open Source Portal
Abstraction of the presentation layer allows User Interface (UI) components to be separate from the orchestration layer and the business service layer. To illustrate, a benefit of the abstraction is the ability to deliver the UI to a wide array of devices (such as PCs, cell phones, PDAs) without modification of the presentation layer’s input stream to accommodate the differences in each.
To help facilitate this approach, Kuali Student will be delivered through an existing portal product. Using a portal provides the opportunity to abstract the presentation layer through standards (such as JSR 168 and WSRP where there is a need for remote portlets).
Portal functionality such as provisioning, customization, and personalization will remain within the domain of the portal rather than within the scope of the Kuali Student project.
Principle 7: Abstraction of the Data Layer
Data abstraction is implemented in three ways:
1. Much of Kuali Student’s data model will be derived from simple abstractions; that is, abstractions representing basic concepts and objects such as time, people, learning units, and learning results. Implementing these abstractions as identifiable domain objects (real-world objects like courses, sections, students, and instructors) is carried out through a series of configuration templates.
2. Data access will be abstracted in the data layer. The purpose is to provide database independence, allowing any ANSI SQL compliant database to be used while still allowing database-specific calls to be made within the data layer for things like performance enhancements.
3. Data access should be abstracted through an ORM framework and as a rule it will be services that provide data. Consequently, applications that need data do not need to understand the details of database navigation.
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 15 of 17 Appendix B – Guiding Principles for Technical Architecture
Leveraging Open Source
Principle 8: System Will Be Built Entirely On An Open Source Software Stack
Licensing and IP Management ! Kuali Student will be built entirely on an open source software stack compatible with the outbound Educational Community License (ECL). Further, Kuali Student will adhere to the Kuali Foundation’s IP management policies for inbound licensing and assessment of 3rd-party licenses.
Open Source Reference Distribution ! Reference distributions of Kuali Student are entirely open source. The reference distributions of Kuali student are entirely open source. That, however, does not preclude implementers from swapping in commercial products for part of the stack. For example, an institution that has a deep investment in Oracle may wish to continue using Oracle for Kuali Student.
Principle 9: Infrastructure Will Be Composed Of Existing Open Source Products
Use of Open Source Infrastructure Components ! It is not within the scope of Kuali Student to build infrastructure components, although the technical team may need to develop web service wrappers for existing products. Kuali Student will use existing open source products for BPEL engines, an Enterprise Service Bus, Workflow and Rules Engine Technology and UI frameworks. By using a formal open source software assessment methodology, such as OpenBRR, OSSM, or QSOS, the technical team will evaluate and select software from well- established open source organizations.
Involvement in Open Source Projects ! Because of the large scope and complex requirements of Kuali Student, and the varying stages of maturity of the various open source solutions, the technical team might become involved with the development of some of the necessary open source components. Involvement with other projects will be evaluated on a case by case basis. To help insure that Kuali Student’s involvement with other open source projects doesn’t become an unnecessary drain on resources, involvement should be limited to very a specific purpose such as a bug fix or feature enhancement.
! For those cases in which Kuali Student necessarily becomes involved in open source projects that pose the risk of becoming costly and ongoing responsibilities, attempts should be made to find external organizations to provide stewardship so that Kuali Student may devolve that responsibility.
Evaluation of Open Source Infrastructure Components ! Infrastructure developed within the Kuali foundation will be evaluated using the same criteria as any other product. Adherence to service orientation is the most important principle. However, within these constraints, Kuali Student will actively seek to leverage Kuali code, concepts, and expertise. Kuali infrastructure products will change and mature over time and therefore this is another area in which there may be a re-evaluation of original choices.
Development
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 16 of 17 Appendix B – Guiding Principles for Technical Architecture
Principle 10: Java as the Language and Platform of Choice
Code that is written as part of the core Kuali Student product should be written in Java and Java will be the platform of choice for Kuali Student. However, partners and other third parties can develop add-ons written in any language and that use a non-Java platform as long as they can work with the Kuali Student web service framework. Above all, this means they must work with the Kuali Student service contracts.
March 2007 Dodds: Kuali Student 17 of 17 Project Name: LionShare
Project URL: http://lionshare.psu.edu
Project Description: The LionShare project is dedicated to harnessing the promise of P2P file-sharing and integrating P2P technologies with organizational services to create a collaborative environment for use within academic communities. The LionShare technology is built around the themes of collaboration, security, and access control of shared resources, and access to large digital repositories. LionShare features include 1) a private and secure P2P network; 2) communication with PeerServers for persistent file sharing and centralized management of resources; 3) advanced security and networking features such as obtaining authentication related credentials, requesting certified attributes about users, and access control to files; 4) various built-in collaboration tools; and 5) querying independent digital repositories outside the LionShare network.
Participating Institutions and key contacts Penn State Michael J. Halm -- Project Director [email protected]
Simon Fraser University Marek Hatala -- Repository Interoperability [email protected]
Internet2/Brown University Steven Carmody -- Security Architecture [email protected]
Milestones and deliverables In the past 12 months several milestones have been reached.
1) June 2006 -- The last major software release of the LionShare v1.1 was completed and released. This included improvements in all the architectural components client software, the PeerServer and SASL-CA. 2 ) September 2006 -- Ss part of the SPIRE project, funded through JISC, a Eclipse plugin for LionShare was developed and released. 3) October 2006 -- Final Report was submitted to the Mellon Foundation completing the funding cycle for the LionShare project. 4) January 2007 -- Further interoperability work was completed, when SQIConnector was developed and released to bridge LionShare with Zope/Plone environment making Plone sites searchable from LionShare. 5) Over the past year -- Adoption activities have ramped up at Penn State and the entire LionShare infrastructure has been made a production service available to all faculty, staff and students of Penn State.
In the coming year, several things are in the works.
1) Continued promotion, training and evangelism of LionShare for use at Penn State and beyond. 2) Interoperability efforts to integrate LionShare with several Penn State software systems including WebLion CMS and Angel 7.2 to promote adoption. 3) Evaluate the existing GUI and make incremental improvements based on user feedback 4) Reevaluation of existing LS architecture looking toward developing an alternative design that would be easier for institution to adopt.
Community The LionShare community at Penn State has been growing as faculty and student discover the capability and usefulness that LionShare technology offers academic users. Ongoing annual activities promote the use of LionShare and training activities are offered throughout the academic year and at key events throughout the year. A wide variety of training and suport material have been developed to encourage adoption. Over the past years, there have been several opportunities to promote LionShare to national and international audiences. The LionShare team will continue to use these opportunities to promote LionShare. Penn State has been asked to participate in a major NSF Cyberinfrastructure grant that would put LionShare at the middle of research collaboration and sharing if funded.
Sustainability While adoption of LionShare at other institution has been slow, interest continues to be encouraging. The NSF Cyberinfrastructure initiative, if funded, could conceivably change the picture dramatically. Software development activities would be funded for an additional 5 years and put LionShare technology at the center of NSFs Cyberinfrastructure efforts. This could drive adoption and development of the technology for a variety of purposes that would support scientific collaboration and sharing. Project Name: LionShare
Project URL: http://lionshare.psu.edu
Project Description: The LionShare project is dedicated to harnessing the promise of P2P file-sharing and integrating P2P technologies with organizational services to create a collaborative environment for use within academic communities. The LionShare technology is built around the themes of collaboration, security, and access control of shared resources, and access to large digital repositories. LionShare features include 1) a private and secure P2P network; 2) communication with PeerServers for persistent file sharing and centralized management of resources; 3) advanced security and networking features such as obtaining authentication related credentials, requesting certified attributes about users, and access control to files; 4) various built-in collaboration tools; and 5) querying independent digital repositories outside the LionShare network.
Participating Institutions and key contacts Penn State Michael J. Halm -- Project Director [email protected]
Simon Fraser University Marek Hatala -- Repository Interoperability [email protected]
Internet2/Brown University Steven Carmody -- Security Architecture [email protected]
Milestones and deliverables In the past 12 months several milestones have been reached.
1) June 2006 -- The last major software release of the LionShare v1.1 was completed and released. This included improvements in all the architectural components client software, the PeerServer and SASL-CA. 2 ) September 2006 -- Ss part of the SPIRE project, funded through JISC, a Eclipse plugin for LionShare was developed and released. 3) October 2006 -- Final Report was submitted to the Mellon Foundation completing the funding cycle for the LionShare project. 4) January 2007 -- Further interoperability work was completed, when SQIConnector was developed and released to bridge LionShare with Zope/Plone environment making Plone sites searchable from LionShare. 5) Over the past year -- Adoption activities have ramped up at Penn State and the entire LionShare infrastructure has been made a production service available to all faculty, staff and students of Penn State.
In the coming year, several things are in the works.
1) Continued promotion, training and evangelism of LionShare for use at Penn State and beyond. 2) Interoperability efforts to integrate LionShare with several Penn State software systems including WebLion CMS and Angel 7.2 to promote adoption. 3) Evaluate the existing GUI and make incremental improvements based on user feedback 4) Reevaluation of existing LS architecture looking toward developing an alternative design that would be easier for institution to adopt.
Community The LionShare community at Penn State has been growing as faculty and student discover the capability and usefulness that LionShare technology offers academic users. Ongoing annual activities promote the use of LionShare and training activities are offered throughout the academic year and at key events throughout the year. A wide variety of training and suport material have been developed to encourage adoption. Over the past years, there have been several opportunities to promote LionShare to national and international audiences. The LionShare team will continue to use these opportunities to promote LionShare. Penn State has been asked to participate in a major NSF Cyberinfrastructure grant that would put LionShare at the middle of research collaboration and sharing if funded.
Sustainability While adoption of LionShare at other institution has been slow, interest continues to be encouraging. The NSF Cyberinfrastructure initiative, if funded, could conceivably change the picture dramatically. Software development activities would be funded for an additional 5 years and put LionShare technology at the center of NSFs Cyberinfrastructure efforts. This could drive adoption and development of the technology for a variety of purposes that would support scientific collaboration and sharing.
QuickTime™ and a MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture. Resources.
Project Name and Start Date
Project name: MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources. Start date: October 2006
Project URL
http://www.mesur.org/
Description of project goals
Project Context: Scholarly evaluation is now largely conducted on the basis of citation data, an approach exemplified by the widespread use of the Thomson Scientific journal Impact Factor. In spite of its merits, citation data suffers from a number of limitations; it is largely limited to journal articles and therefore expresses mostly the opinions of authors of journal articles, and lags scholarly developments due to publication delays. Usage data has therefore been proposed as a means to provide a more complete evaluation of scholarly impact in addition to citation data. However, the lack of a solid theoretical and practical foundation has hampered the introduction of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact.
Project Goals: A program to survey a range of usage-based metrics of scholarly impact on the basis of a large-scale reference data set that, represented as a semantic network, combines usage data with citation and bibliographic data.
The project will proceed as follows: • Definition of a model of the scholarly communication process, represented as an OWL/RDF ontology. • The creation of a large-scale reference data set containing: o Usage data obtained from a representative, international sample of publishers, aggregators and institutions. o Large-scale citation and bibliographic data. • The resulting reference data set will take the form of semantic network stored by an RDF triple store organized according to the previously defined OWL/RDF ontology.
Johan Bollen – MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources 1/5 • A range of usage-based metrics will be defined and validated on the basis of the created reference data set by a process including: ! Cross-validation to a set of existing reference metrics, in particular the Thomson Scientific journal Impact Factor and COUNTER usage statistics. ! Investigating the correlation structure of the various usage-based metrics to determine how they express varying aspects of the general notion of scholarly impact. ! Correlation of the resulting metrics to bibliographic and citation data to determine their semantics as indicators of particular facets of scholarly impact.
Participating Institutions and key people (include role, email address and/or personal web page)
The project is executed at the Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library.
Project principal investigator:
• Johan Bollen, Los Alamos National Laboratory, [email protected], http://public.lanl.gov/jbollen
Team members:
• Herbert Van de Sompel, Architectural Consultant, Los Alamos National Laboratory, [email protected], http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/ • Marko A. Rodriguez, PhD student (UCSC), Los Alamos National Laboratory, [email protected], http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram • Aric Hagberg, Statistical and Mathematical Consultant, Los Alamos National Laboratory, [email protected], http://math.lanl.gov/~hagberg/ • Luydmila Balakireva, Software developer and database administration, Los Alamos National Laboratory, [email protected]
Collaborating organizations:
• COUNTER: [email protected] • A range of international publishers, aggregators, and institutions whose identity we can not reveal due to MESUR’s strict privacy and confidentiality guidelines.
Highlights
The project is in the first phases of the development of its reference data set. Agreements have been achieved with a set of significant international publishers, aggregators and scholarly institutions. The project has defined an OWL/RDF ontology and associated
Johan Bollen – MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources 2/5 XML schema for the representation of its model of the scholarly communication process, has defined an internal format for the storage of obtained usage data, has successfully set up the hardware required to store and process the obtained data, and is in the process of preparing an initial proof-of-principle analysis on the basis of a usage data subset. Loading and normalization of obtained usage data, in particular at the journal level, is ongoing as additional usage data is obtained.
The project’s recent activities have resulted in three peer-reviewed publications: - Marko A. Rodriguez, Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel. A Practical Ontology for the Large-Scale Modeling of Scholarly Artifacts and their Usage (full-length paper). In print: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Vancouver, June 2007. - MESUR: usage-based metrics of scholarly impact (poster). Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez and Herbert Van de Sompel. In print: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Vancouver, June 2007. - The Largest Scholarly Semantic Network...Ever (poster). Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, Herbert Van de Sompel, Lyudmilla Balakireva, and Aric Hagberg. In print: World Wide Web Conference 2007.
Milestones and deliverables
Last 6 months (as specified in proposal workplan):
Quarter 1: October 1st, 2006 to December 31st, 2007 1) Definition of OWL/RDF schema, ontology and required formats: completed, with revisions being made as required by project needs. 2) Agreements with prominent usage data providers: ongoing. At this date nearly 25 parties have been contacted. Agreements are in place or forthcoming with at least 18 of these. Work has concentrated on the following: - Definition of template agreement stipulating MESUR guidelines with regards to data ownership, data sharing, data privacy, confidentiality guidelines, and arrangements with regards to the publication of results. - Definition of technical specification document outlining the requested extent of usage data and its data elements. - Extensive personal negotiations to establish data sharing agreements satisfactory to both parties. 3) Set-up of services to manage, process, and normalize incoming usage data after achieving agreements with data providers: on-going as usage data is made available. 4) Definition of data formats: completed, with revisions being made as required by project needs. 5) hardware set-up: completed. 6) definition and investigation of de-duplication method: on-going on basis of obtained item-level usage data.
Johan Bollen – MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources 3/5 Quarter 2: January 1st, 2007 to March 31st, 2007 1) Implementation of data normalization, de-duplication and insertion modules: ongoing with a particular focus on journal level usage data to enable initial scaling experiments and analysis of data validity. 2) Demonstrate prototype with LANL test data: LANL data has been loaded at the journal level. Analysis will proceed in next two weeks, to be completed by end of March, early April. 3) Loading participant data: partially completed at the journal level for a significant number of obtained usage data sets.
CY 2007 Anticipated:
• Release and publication of results of first proof-of-principle, journal-level analysis. • Further extension of reference data set as more usage-data is obtained. • Deepening of reference data set to item-level data. • Commencement of project Phase II “Characterization of semantic network”, i.e. the study of the general topological features of the generated semantic network to derive indicators of the overall structure of the scholarly community and its sub- communities.
Community
Current Status:
• See “Participating Institutions”, above.
Contributors:
• See “Participating Institutions”, above.
Users:
• None. The MESUR project does not seek to implement or provide end-user services.
Plans for development:
• Increasing collaboration with other groups focused on the analysis of usage data. • Ongoing efforts to obtain further usage data and determine representativeness and reliability of final reference data set.
Progress toward those plans:
• Ongoing exploration of possible collaborative projects with various parties.
Johan Bollen – MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources 4/5 • Collaboration with statistical and mathematical consultant in LANL Theoretical Physics group.
Sustainability
Plan:
The MESUR project has been scoped to execute its objective of surveying a range of usage-based metrics, but does not have the resources to ensure the archival of the manifold of data sets that (will) contain the project’s results.
• MESUR may need to: o Identify and examine the need to sustain its results and associated document. o Examine methods to ensure the proper archival of its result documents.
Progress toward plan:
None, so far.
Synergy opportunities with other projects.
- COUNTER: COUNTER’s efforts to define a standard for standardized, publisher- generated journal usage statistics has generated a wealth of experience highly relevant to the MESUR project. Conversations with COUNTER representatives have been ongoing for the duration of the project and have been a strong source of support for the MESUR project. - Scholars Portal of the Ontario Consortium of University Libraries: seeks to aggregate resource use data from search, access to electronic journals, personal citation management, and resource sharing services. Data sharing agreements with this project may yield considerable synergy with the MESUR efforts. - The Andrew W. Mellon-funded “Developing Archival Metrics for College and University Archives” project
Johan Bollen – MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources 5/5 MOCSL - Retreat Report
Making Open Content Support Learning (MOCSL) supports end users’ abilities to find, localize, and reuse educational resources, and close the feedback loop between end users and content authors
Project Name and Start Date Making OpenContent Support Learning (MOCSL), October 2006
Project URL http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/mocsl/
Brief Description of Project Goals Making Open Content Support Learning (MOCSL) is a set of smaller tools designed specifically to advance the state of the art in supporting end users’ abilities to find educational resources, localize and reuse educational resources, and close the feedback loop between end users and content authors.
The tools are in various stages of development and will release for public use over the course of 2007.
Participating Institutions and key people - Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University - David Wiley, PI, [email protected], http://davidwiley.org/ - Justin Ball, Technical Lead, http://justinball.com/, [email protected] - George Mason University Zotero Team
Highlights
• Ozmozr received several great reviews on its alpha release in January 2007 on Web 2.0 sites like Mashable!, with over 200 users signing up in the first week. ContentLicensing tool for Plone has been adopted by the Plone4Artists project.
Milestones and Deliverables Last 12 months:
• Launched Ozmozr.com Alpha • Released the ContentLicensing product for Plone that makes it easy for Plone users to use Creative Commons, GFDL, and other open licenses, and embeds all content metadata (including license metadata) within Plone documents as RDF • Finalized the data storage/access system we will use for all RDF-based projects
CY 2007 Anticipated We will release the following additional MOCSL tools in 2007:
• Scrumdidilyumptious is a tool that allows a user to express a relationship between any two resources viewable in a web browser, and store and access these relationship expressions later either as HTML, RSS, or RDF. • MakeAPath is an add-on to Scrumdidilyumptious that will both let users create paths of arbitrary length (stored as individual URI to URI relations) and will automatically generate paths based on all relations expressed by system users. • Send2Wiki is a tool that allows users to send OERs directly into a wiki with the push of a (bookmarklet) button in order to build derivative works. • Annorate is a tool that allows users to rate and make notes on web pages. • OER Finder is an extension of the OCW Finder (http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/). The Finder will provide a novel interface into the aggregated RSS feeds provided by different OCW and OER collections. • Resource Recommender is a Didily- and Ozmozr-enabled web service that recommends new resources to people.
Community Current Status
• Ozmozr.com has been publicly available for less than two weeks but has a user community of 200. • Our ContentLicensing tool has been adopted by the Plone4Artists project (http://plone4artists.org/tour) and is in use by all eduCommons and Plone4Artists users.
Contributors
• Users – See above • Plans for development – Ozmozr source code will be placed on SourceForge as the “OzCode” project. ContentLicensing product will be placed in Plone products repository on Plone.org. We will use conference presentation, blogs, and other channels to recruit contributors. • Progress toward those plans – ContentLicensing product is currently in the Plone products repository. OzCode will be up on SF.net by the end of January. We have already begun advocating the ContentLicensing product, and will begin advocating OzCode once it goes online.
Sustainability
• Plan – We are in the very early stages of creating a sustainability plan. • Progress toward plan – None to date
Synergy Opportunities with Other Orojects
The Zotero project at George Mason University, which is creating a Firefox Extension that will help users create, manage, and use bibliographic data for scholarly books and articles, has expressed an interest in using Didily to store its relations data. Relations between two sources like “Book 1 is an Italian translation of Book 2” are perfect candidates for storage in the database. Utah State University and George Mason University have already agreed to share data both directions. We will harvest publicly accessible Zotero data in Ozmozr, and George Mason University will also be able to harvest publicly accessible Ozmozr data. This data sharing will be done in support of a recommendation service. Because the goal of MOCSL tools like Send2Wiki and Annorate is to “take the tools to the content,” there are a number of opportunities for synergy with OpenCourseWare and Sakai. Both of these projects could easily add MOCSL functionality to their sites that would provide benefits to their end users.
There are also interesting opportunities to export RDF from MakeAPath and Didily directly in VUE 2 once RDF is supported.
Open Archives Initiative Object Re-Use and Exchange (OAI-ORE)
Project Name and Start Date
Project name: Open Archives Initiative Object Re-Use and Exchange (OAI-ORE) Start date: October 2006
Project URL
http://www.openarchives.org/ore
Description of project goals
Project Context: Rapidly changing scholarly landscape.
• We are in the midst of radical changes in the way that scholars produce, share, and access the results of their work and that of their colleagues. • We are seeing dramatic growth in the deployment of scholarly repositories including institutional repositories, dataset repositories, and others. • These repositories host new types of scholarly documents, namely compound digital objects that, rather than being static and text-based, flexibly combine data, text, images, and services in multiple ways regardless of their location and genre.
Project Goals: Provide an interoperable fabric to allow use and re-use of compound digital objects in a variety of contexts.
Develop, identify, and profile extensible standards and protocols to allow repositories, agents, and services to interoperate in the context of use and reuse of compound digital objects beyond the boundaries of the holding repositories.
The project focus is to aim for more effective and consistent ways: • To facilitate discovery of these objects, • To reference (link to) these objects (and parts thereof), • To obtain a variety of disseminations of these objects, • To aggregate and disaggregate these objects, • To enable processing by automated agents.
Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel 1/4 Participating Institutions and key people (include role, email address and/or personal web page)
Project Coordinators:
• Carl Lagoze, Cornell University, PI, [email protected], http://www.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze/ • Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, PI, [email protected], http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/
Technical Committee: Problem statement, scoping, identification of existing technologies, specification, experimentation.
Les Carr (University of Southampton), Leigh Dodds (Ingenta), Tim DiLauro (Johns Hopkins University), Dave Fulker (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), Tony Hammond (Nature Publishing Group), Pete Johnston (EduServ Foundation), Richard Jones (Imperial College), Peter Murray (OhioLINK), Michael Nelson (Old Dominion University), Ray Plante (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), Rob Sanderson (University of Liverpool), Simeon Warner (Cornell University), Jeff Young (OCLC).
Liaison Group: Communication bridge with projects that share OAI-ORE objectives.
Leonardo Candela (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy) for EC DRIVER, Tim Cole (UUIC) for the Digital Library Federation Aquifer, Julie Allinson (UKOLN) for the JISC Digital Repository support effort, Jane Hunter (University of Queensland) for Australian Department of Education, Science and Technology, Savas Parastatidis (Microsoft) for Miscrosoft’s eScience effort, Thomas Place (University of Tilburg) for the Dutch DARE, Andy Powell (EduServ Foundation) for the Dublin Core community, Rob Tansley (Google) for Google and DSpace.
Advisory Committee: Strategic guidance and outreach.
Sayeed Choudhury (Johns Hopkins University), Gregory Crane (Tufts University), Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC), Mark Doyle (The American Physical Society), John Erickson (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories), Steve Griffin (National Science Foundation), Robert Hanisch (Space Telescope Science Institute), Jane Hunter (The University of Queensland), Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information), Liz Lyon (UKOLN), Peter Murray Rust (University of Cambridge), Jim Ostell (National Center for Biotechnology Information), Sandy Payette (Cornell University), Robby Robson (Eduworks), MacKenzie Smith (MIT), Leo Waaijers (The Netherlaqnds’ SURF Platform ICT and Research).
Highlights
Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel 2/4 The ongoing effort aims to develop solutions that are fully congruent with the Web architecture. Therefore, the problem space is approached from the perspective of the Web environment, and requirements regarding the representation of compound objects and repository interfaces are derived from that perspective. This approach is illustrated in the report of the first in-person meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical Committee (see http://www.openarchives.org/ore/documents/OAI-ORE-TC-Meeting-200701.pdf).
Milestones and deliverables
Last 6 months:
• Creation of Technical Committee, Liaison Group, Advisory Committee, • Definition of Goals and Scope, • Write-up of sample Use Cases, • Definition and discussion of preliminary ORE Model (expressed in terms of the Web architecture) for the representation of Compound Digital Objects, • Develop insights regarding Web-agent discovery of Compound Digital Objects, • Identification of relevant related technologies and standards, • Establish perspective on issues regarding resource identification, • Presentation of project goals and progress at several conferences.
CY 2007 Anticipated:
• Release of alpha specifications for the representation and discovery of Compound Digital Objects, • Experimentation based on alpha specifications, • Outreach towards various communities regarding project progress and involvement in experimentation.
Community
Current Status:
• See “Participating Institutions”, above.
Contributors:
• See “Participating Institutions”, above.
Users:
• None, so far.
Plans for development:
Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel 3/4 • Possible extension of Liaison Group in order to optimize synergies with other projects. • Community likely to be extended when alpha specifications are released, and when experimentation starts.
Progress toward those plans:
• Ongoing exploration of possible experimentation projects with various parties, • Inclusion of OAI-ORE compatibility requirement in April 2007 JISC Call for Proposals.
Sustainability
Plan:
The following needs have been identified, so far:
• When finalized, OAI-ORE will need: o Long-lasting Web presence for the resulting specifications and reference software, o Minimally 1 to 2 year e-mail based support to assist implementation of the specifications. • In order to promote adoption of OAI-ORE specifications, follow-up implementation projects and community outreach will be required.
Progress toward plan:
None, so far.
Synergy opportunities with other projects
• See “Liaison Group”, above. • See “Progress towards those plans” above.
Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel 4/4 The OAI Object Re-Use & Exchange (ORE) Initiative
Herbert Van de Sompel (1) & Carl Lagoze (2)
(1) Research Library, Los Alamos National Laboratory (2) Information Science,,y Cornell University
OAI-ORE is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional support of the National Science Foundation
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange
• OAI-ORE is a new effort conducted under the umbrella of the OAI
• International effort; October 2006 - September 2008:
o Coordinators: Carl Lagoze & Herbert Van de Sompel
o ORE Technical Committee: 13 international members
o ORE Liaison Group: 8 international members
o ORE Advisory Committee: 16 international members
o Representing: scholarly publishers and aggregators, eScience, eHumanities, education, search engines, various repository systems, digital library efforts, related standardization efforts, etc.
• See http://www.openarchives.org/ore/
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Compound Information Objects
Units of scholarly communication are compound information objects:
id
Identified, bounded aggregations of related information units that form a logical whole. id
compound information objects
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Examples of Compound Information Objects
• Scholarly publication with an article and supporting information including dataset, video, etc. • Digitized book with multiple chapters, each chapter containing multiple scanned pages. • Archaeological assemblies of images, maps, charts, and find lists. • An ARTstor image object that is the aggregation of various renderings of the same source image. •…
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Compound Information Objects
Units of scholarly communication are compound information objects:
Components of a compound object may vary according to: • Semantic type: o Text o Still image o Moving image o Datasets o Software o Bibliographic and other types of metadata o … •Media type:
o PDF
o HTML
o JPEG
o Mp3
o …
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Access Repositories
Compound objects are made accessible by a variety of scholarly repositories:
• Institutional repositories • Discipline-oriented repositories • Publisher repositories • Dataset repositories • Cultural heritage repositories • Learning object repositories • Digitized book and manuscript collections • Research-group and managed personal (ePortfolio) repositories •…
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Access Repositories
Repositories expose compound objects in manners specific to the repository architecture:
• Interfaces (API & user-oriented) • Identification schemes • Representation of compound objects • Mapping of compound objects and components to the Web
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze OAI-ORE Standards Protocols
Systems that manage Systems that leverage digital objects managed digital objects
• Institutional repositories • All repositories from left • Research-group and managed column personal (ePortfolio) • Search engines repositories • Authoring tools • Discipline-oriented repositories • Citation management tools • Publisher repositories • Collaborative environments • Dataset repositories • Social network applications • Cultural heritage repositories • Graph analysis tools • Learning object repositories • Preservation services • Digitized book and manuscript • Workflow tools collections •…
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Working with the Web architecture
• Whatever we do it must be congruent with the Web architecture
o Use existing capabilities where they are appropriate
o Cleanly layer capabilities meeting the needs of our problem space
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Observation 1 Components of compound object must be mapped to resources in order to be reference-able
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Observation 2 In the mapping from components to resources, the boundary of the originating compound object is lost
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Observation 3 Map the compound object to a resource with a representation that formally expresses the boundaries of the object
Machine readable
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Observation 4 Allow for discovery of that representation (and hence of the compound object) by Web applications
HTTP LINK HEADER
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Observation 4 bis Allow for discovery of that representation (and hence of the compound object) by Web applications
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Observation 5 This approach reveals compound objects in the Web graph
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange
• A core goal of OAI-ORE is to develop standardized, interoperable, and machine-readable mechanisms by which individual repositories can map and thereby expose compound objects to the Web. • These mechanisms will allow Web applications to reconstruct:
o The boundaries of compound objects
o The relationships among their internal components
o Their relationship to other resources on the Web
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange
digital objects • Develop,interoperate identify, and profile extensible standards and protocols to allow repositories, agents, and services to in the context of use and reuse of compound beyond the boundaries of the holding repositories.
•Aim ffffor more effective and consistent ways: o to facilitate discovery of these objects, o to reference (link to) these objects (and parts thereof), o to obtain a variety of disseminations of these objects, o to aggregate and disaggregate these objects, o Enable processing by automated agents
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Questions
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Compound object from aDORe repository
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze DC component of compound object
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze MPEG-21 DIDL component of compound object
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Zotero discovers a pointer to a Canonical Representation of the compound object
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Zotero parses the Canonical Representation and lets the user select components
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze Zotero now holds a derived compound object with multiple components
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze QuickTime™ and a Microsoft Video 1 decompressor are needed to see this picture.
… A DIDL component
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze … a BIOSIS XML component
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze … a DC component
Object Re-Use and Exchange Mellon Retreat, Nassau Inn, Princeton, NJ, March 29 2007 Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze
OCW Project Report
Mellon Research in Information Technology/ Scholarly Communication Retreat
Project Name MIT OpenCourseWare; First foundation proposal April 2001; Pilot launched 2002. & Start Date
Project URL http://ocw.mit.edu/
Project Goals Publication Goals • Expand publication with new MIT course materials per established schedule • Maintain currency of published content • Continually improve depth and quality of OCW course materials • Continually improve user features and site structure to optimize the user experience
Outreach Goals • Increase traffic to OCW content through Google, mirror sites, translations and recognition. • Expand the OCW Consortium. • Support MIT and its community.
Sustainability Goals • Continually develop OCW team as a responsive, professional organization • Maintain and improve efficient and effective processes • Manage finances and secure long-term funding • Evaluate and report on attainment of short-term goals and progress toward long-term goals • Communicate the OCW story to build awareness and keep stakeholders informed
Participating MIT OCW Institutions • Anne Margulies, Executive Director, [email protected] and Key • Cecilia d’Oliveira, Technology Director, [email protected] People • Christopher Merlan, Publication Director, [email protected] • Steve Carson, Director of External Relations, [email protected]
OCW Translation Affiliates • Universia, http://www.universia.net/ (Spanish and Portuguese) • China Open Resources for Education (CORE), http://www.core.org.cn/en/ (Simplified Chinese) • Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), http://www.myoops.org/ (Traditional Chinese)
OCW Consortium, http://www.ocwconsortium.org (~120 member institutions) • John Dehlin, Director (interim), [email protected] Highlights OCW is a free, publicly accessible, and openly licensed reusable digital resource that offers high quality learning materials structured around courses and presented in a reasonably consistent format. OCW is a publication of course materials created by faculty (and sometimes other colleagues or students) to support teaching and learning. For any given course, the published materials should fully convey the parameters of the course’s subject matter and ideally include a substantially complete set of all the materials used in the course. Typical content may include: • Planning materials: Syllabus, calendar, pedagogical statement, and faculty introductions. • Subject matter content: Lecture notes, reading lists, full-text readings, video/audio lectures. • Learning activities: Problem sets, essay assignments, quizzes, exams, labs, and projects.
OCW is not a distance education program or an online, mediated learning system. Rather, it is a publication. Target audiences are a) educators, who may adopt or adapt the materials for their own teaching purposes; b) students enrolled in educational programs, who may use the materials for reference, practice exercises, or mapping out their programs of study; and c) self-learners, who may find the materials helpful for enhancing their personal knowledge either from the materials themselves or from the many references, readings, and other resources.
A key feature of OCW is that the materials are IP-cleared, meaning that MIT (or any other OCW institution) has the rights, either through ownership or by license (permission), to make the materials available under open terms, and that nothing in the materials infringes the copyrights of others.
MIT OCW is offered under a standard Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Milestones Last 12 months and deliverables Publication • Published over 300 new courses, surpassing 1550 mark • Updated over 150 existing OCW courses • Expanded video and audio offerings - Over 1000 hours of video - 22 courses with complete lecture series • Introduced ZIP download feature (>1.6M course downloads to date) • Began archiving 250 retired OCW courses to MIT’s Dspace digital archive ! Signed first publisher blanket permission arrangement • Over 80% MIT faculty participation so far • Over 4000 contributors in total Outreach • Attracted record traffic to MIT OCW content, now averaging over 1.5 million visits per month (2M+ in January 2007) • Expanded mirror sites in Africa/Asia to 100+ • Created pilot version of OCW Consortium portal (http://ocwconsortium.org) Sustainability • Launched OCW External Advisory Board • Completed Steady State sustainability plan • Piloted Amazon.com book sales link
CY 2007 anticipated Publication • Complete Phase II by publishing remaining MIT courses, bringing total to 1800 • Redesign OCW web site global pages Outreach • Spin off OCW Consortium as separately funded effort ! Decide “go/no go” for OCW secondary education (OCW-SE) initiative Sustainability • Implement new fundraising strategy • Transition to Steady State operation Community Unique visitors: ~12 million Visitor profile • 16% educators • 32% students • 47% self-learners • 5% other
Visitor location • 39% US • 61% international Detailed 2005 evaluation report describing access, use, and impact available at http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/FA49E066-B838-4985-B548- F85C40B538B8/0/05_Prog_Eval_Report_Final.pdf
Sustainability The MIT OCW sustainability plan for Steady State operation (2008 and beyond) is based on a reduced publication work load (approximately 200 courses per year) and combines continuing MIT budget support, fundraising, and modest generation of revenue from Amazon commissions on sale of course related books.
Synergy Collaboration with other institutions and partners has been and continues to be an important opportunities strategy for achieving OCW goals. MIT OCW routinely works with other institutions interested in with other creating their own OCWs. In addition, we work with others on specific planning and software projects development projects. Some current examples: • MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—automated time- encoded transcripts from audio stream of video materials to aid hearing- impaired users. • Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University— eduCommons tool for OCW publishing; common OCW evaluation tools; (with other collaborators) tools to support online collaboration communities. • University of Michigan—OCW tool for Sakai. • MIT Libraries—automated workflow for archiving OCW content in user- accessible DSpace digital repository.
Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) Start Date January 1, 2001 http://www.okiproject.org
Project goals
The Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I) develops and promotes specifications that describe how the components of a software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise systems. O.K.I. specifications enable sustainable interoperability and integration by defining standards for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Through this work O.K.I. seeks to open new market opportunities across a wide range of software application domains.
To this end, O.K.I. has developed and published the Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), whose design has been informed by a broad architectural view. The OSIDs define important components of a SOA as they provide general software contracts between service consumers and service providers. This enables applications to be constructed independently of any particular service environment, and eases integration. The OSIDs enable choice of end- user tools by providing plug-in interoperability.
For more information contact: Jeff Merriman Executive Director, Open Knowledge Initiative IS&T - ISDA Massachusetts Institute of Technology Room N42-069 Cambridge, MA 02139 617-452-4039 [email protected]
Milestones and deliverables Last 12 months: • Near doubling of O.K.I. related development globally • Development and announcement of O.K.I. consortium plan and identification of Founding Partners (see below) • Definition and announcement of OpeniWorld CY 2007 Anticipated: • OpeniWorld:eLearn conference, August 9 and 10 in New Orleans. In conjunction with MERLOT conference (see http://www.openiworld.org/) • Potential Launch of O.K.I. Consortium as independent entity
Community
The Community of adopters of the O.K.I. OSIDs is growing daily. It included both commercial and open source software projects and products, as well as institutions attempting to design enterprise architectures focused on interoperability and modularity.
At the end of this document is a list of almost 60 known projects of various kinds and scale that are currently utilizing the OSID specifications.
Sustainability
On January 9th, 2007 The Institute for Electronic Governance (IEG) of Andra Pradesh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California State University (CSU) system announced a joint effort to consolidate growing support across their communities of practice for the interoperability specifications developed by the MIT Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.). This collaborative effort will promote the use of O.K.I.’s Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) and other critical standards to raise the level of interoperability among the components of information systems used in education, government services and other applications.
IEG, MIT and CSU have declared their intent to form an organization that will extend the "network effect" sparked by the Open Knowledge Initiative in order to recruit support from institutions, agencies, companies and other interested parties for the advancement of service oriented interoperability and the adoption and use of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs). This effort will create a demand driven forum for discovering and developing market opportunities for interoperable products and services. It will facilitate a diverse assortment of product implementations, experiments, and research and development projects, and will support the development and sharing of knowledge, best practices, and testing methodologies.
A primary purpose of the organization outlined above is to support ongoing activity of the O.K.I. Project. Four contribution levels have been identified:
Founding Partners: The Founding Partners make up the initial decision making board for the organization itself. Founding Partner contribution takes the form of an annual fee, participating personnel, and resources. The contribution is used for recruiting participants, retaining administrative personnel and providing the operational capability of the O.K.I. organization. The form of the initial contribution is negotiable, subject to the approval of the Executive Director and Founding Partners. The following guidelines currently have informal approval.
• Length of commitment: 3 years, subject to annual renewal • Annual fee: $50,000 • Participation by Personnel: Engagement in O.K.I. annual meeting, Committees, and other activities as agreed among the Founding Partners and other contributors.
Founding partners may contribute additional funds and/or resources at their discretion, as well as participate in all regular or special activities.
In addition to the Founding Partners, a general contribution model has been identified that encompasses three additional levels of participation:
Sustaining Members: Deep participation through funding and support of activities of the consortium to influence direction of O.K.I. Exercise leadership and governance at project/activity level. Sustaining Members contribute at the Participating Member level plus fund projects of the consortium of mutual benefit under the general agreement that:
• Projects must be approved by Board and Executive Director • Deliverables, Start/End date, Scope of Work are clearly documented • Funding is in the form of money or clearly valuated contribution • IP of funded effort belongs to Consortium (MIT in the near-term) to be published openly under an open license • The project and nature of member contribution is documented and publicly exposed
Participating Members: Fee paying participants in general O.K.I. activities. Access to Consortium working meetings, training sessions, events and forums.
Affiliates: Organizational relationships of mutual value. Cross membership at appropriate level
Synergies With Other Mellon Projects
There are currently a number of Mellon Foundation funded projects that are working, or have worked with, O.K.I. and the OSID specifications in one way or another. They include: the Visual Understanding Environment, Sakai, Sakaibrary, Lionshare, Sophie, DSpace, Fedora ARTStor and JStore. More details are included in the attached table of known OSID activity.
It is expected that the Mellon hosted O.K.I. Meeting being held on Wednesday, March 28th 2007 and the O.K.I. Interoperability Report, recently released by the Ithaka organization will identify further synergies and activities with current and potential future Mellon projects.
Appendix: Known OSID-based Activity
Activity Type Principals OSIDs Notes Repository Commercial Repository Browse and federated Search Hive Explorer Harvest Road AuthN Application Tool Install Application for Assembling Learning Commercial Objects from Content Stored in LearneXact Packager Giunti Labs Repository Application Repositories. First commercial Application Commercial SearchParty Apple Education Repository Mac OSX Native Search Tool Application Commercial Search and Retrieve Integration with ARTStor Ithaka Repository Service Impl ARTStor Commercial Search and Retrieve Integration for BFW BFW eLibrary Collection BFW Publishing Repository Service Impl collection on Documentum Search and Retrieve Integration with Commercial Cisco VMS Cisco Systems Repository Cisco's Video Service Impl Management System Search and retrieve integration of Commercial Pachyderm EmbARK Repository Gallery Systems Service Impl ARTStor Product used by multiple museums Search, Retrieve, browse and publish Commercial Repository Hive Harvest Road Integration for Service Impl AuthN HR Hive Object Repository Commercial University of London Search, retrieve and publish integration Intralect IntraLibrary Repository Service Impl Birkbeck College Library with Intralibrary service Commercial Search and Retrieve Integration with JStor Ithaka Repository Service Impl JStor Search and Retrieve Integration for Commercial LearneXact Lobster Giunti Labs Repository Lobster object repository system Service Impl First commercial Implementation Commercial University of London Search, retrieve and publish integration LearningEdge Equella Repository Service Impl Birkbeck College Library with Equella service Pearson Custom Commercial Search and Retrieve Integration with Pearson Publishing Repository Choices Service Impl Pearson Mark Logic system AuthN AuthZ Agent Nine Campus consortium - integration Enterprise Open University of Dictionary Campus Project project with Moodle and Sakai Project Catalonia Hierarchy
Id Logging UserMessaging Repository Enterprise AuthN Enterprise integration activity in support Digital Marketplace CSU Project AuthZ of CSU Digital Marketplace project Others
Institutional LMS-based Image Access and Stellar Image Tool MIT Repository Application Presentation of image content Institutional VCID MIT Visualizing Cultures Repository Web-based tool for Exploring VC Content Application Institutional Repository Client-based editing tool for managing VCID Metadata Editor MIT Visualizing Cultures Application AuthN shadow asset metadata Institutional Repository System Supporting Management of M:Media Application + MIT MetaMedia AuthN Personal Media Collections Service Impl AuthZ Institutional Search and Retrieve Integration with Artifact Tufts University Repository Service Impl campus image collection Search and Retrieve integration with Institutional Celebrate European Schoolnet Repository European Schoolnet repository using Service Impl java Messaging for asynchronous access Search and Retrieve Integration with Institutional Connexions Rice University Repository Rice Connexions Service Impl as Content Repository Institutional Search and Retrieve Integration with MERLOT MERLOT Repository Service Impl MERLOT Search and Retrieve Integration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Institutional MFA, Boston Repository Museum of Boston Service Impl MIT Visualizing Cultures Fine Arts, Boston Search and Retrieve Integration with Institutional Roche Visual Collection MIT Repository Image Collection Service Impl Served by DSpace Language Language Binding of OSIDs for C#. Not OKI for C# MIT All Binding Yet released Preliminary Language Binding of OSIDs Language MIT Repository OKI for Objective C for Objective C, the Binding Apple Education Id Native Mac OSX Language Language Language Binding of OSIDs for PHP. OKI for PHP Middlebury All Binding Available on SourceForge Open Source Apple Education Application for Accessing Content in iTunes U BuildingBlock Repository Application BlackBoard iTunesU Open Source Web-based presentation of Image-based Pachyderm CSU Center for Distributed Repository Application Material Sakai tool to facilitate Access to Libraries Open Source Indiana University Sakaibrary Repository and Other Application University of Michigan Content Collections Federated search Web Service, focused Open Source USC Annenberg School for Sophie Repository on Java to Application Communicagtions Python cross language support Tool to manage content migration Open Source University of London between repository systems SOURCE Project Repository Application Birkbeck College Library Current targets: Intrallect IntraLibrary, Learning Edge Equella Older Sakai-based Repository access Open Source Twin Peaks Indiana University Repository app. To be Application superceded by Sakaibrary Concept Mapping Tool with Repository Repository Open Source Integration VUE 1.0 Tufts University AuthN Application First Open Source App, Initial integration Filing with Fedora Repository Open Source VUE 1.5 Search Tufts University Filing Enhanced federated Search for VUE Application Install Exporting Maps from VUE Directly into Open Source VUE 2.0 Publish Tufts University Repository Campus Systems Application Initial target: Sakai Open Source Peer-to-Peer Content Sharing with Lionshare Application + Penn State University Repository Repository Access Service Impl Open Source eduSource Canada Search and Retrieve with Edusource ECL Repository Service Impl. Penn State University Canada Open Source Search, Retrieve and Publish Integration Fedora 1.x Tufts University Repository Service Impl. with Fedora 1.x Open Source Search and Retrieve Integration with Fedora 2.0 Tufts University Repository Service Impl. Fedora 2.0 Open Source Search and Retrieve Integration with Google Tufts Repository Service Impl. Google Open Source Search and Retrieve Integration with Google Enterprise Tufts Repository Service Impl. Google Enterprise Complete Suite of Implementations in Open Source Harmoni Middlebury All Support of Service Impl. PHP-based Systems Open Source Search and Retrieve integration with IMS IMS RLI Oxford University Repository Service Impl. RLI package Open Source Repository iTunes U Publish Apple Education Pilot Publish Integration with iTunesU Service Impl. AuthN Open Source Repository Pilot Search and Retrieve Integration for iTunes U Search Apple Education Service Impl. AuthN iTunes U Open Source Shibboleth authentication Shibboleth CSU/DM AuthN Service Impl. implementation Open Source SQI ARIADNE Repository Search and Retrive Integration with SQI Service Impl. Open Source MIT Search and Retrieve Integration using SRW/U Repository Service Impl. OCLC SRW/U Open Source Tufts Digital Library Tufts University Repository Search and Retrieve with Fedora Service Impl. Search and Retrieve Access to Various Open Source VCID Collections MIT Visualizing Cultures Repository MIT-held Collections Service Impl. of the Visualizing Cultures Program Open Source Search and Retrieve Integration with Z39.50/Jafer Oxford University Repository Service Impl. Jafer service Open Source Concerto Middlebury College Many PHP-based content management system System Open Source Segue Middlebury College Many PHP-based learning management system System Adapter implemtation supporting CSU Repository Federator Service Adapter Repository federated search across multiple Harvest Road repositories Adapter implementation for applying ShadowAsset Service Adapter MIT Visualizing Cultures Repository metadata to third party collections.
Single Application Integrates with a Service OSID
Service Provider does 1 work Unit Service Provider does 1 work Unit
Service Consumer does 1 work Service Consumer does 1 work Unit Unit
2 New Work Units 2 New Work Units
2 Total Work Units 2 Total Work Units
Example: Visualizing Cultures web site integrates with it’s own back end database Single Application Integrates with another Service Instance
OSID
Service Provider does 1 work Unit Service Provider does 1 work Unit Service Consumer does 1 work Service Consumer does 0 work Unit Unit
2 New Work 1 New Work Units Units 4 Total Work 3 Total Work Units Units
Example: Visualizing Cultures web site integrates with Museum of Fine Arts Single Application Integrates with another Service Instance
OSID
Service Provider does 1 work Service Provider does 1 work Unit Unit Service Consumer does 1 work Unit Service Consumer does 0 work Unit 2 New Work Units 1 New Work Units 6 Total Work Units 4 Total Work Units Example: Visualizing Cultures web site integrates with Dspace Second Application Integrates with all Service Instances
OSID
Service Provider does 0 work Service Provider does 0 work Units Units Service Consumer does 3 work Service Consumer does 1 work Units Units
3 New Work 1 New Work Units Units 9 Total Work 5 Total Work Units Units
Example: Stellar integrates with Visualizing Cultures, MFA, and Dspace Third Application Integrates with all Service Instances
Service Provider does 1 work Units Service Provider does 0 work Units
Service Consumer does 3 work Units Service Consumer does 1 work Units 4 New Work Units 1 New Work Units 16 Total Work Units 6 Total Work Units
Example: M:Media integrates with Visualizing Cultures, MFA, and Dspace One Service Instance changes & application reintegrate
Service Provider does 1 work Units Service Provider does 1 work Units
Service Consumer does 3 work Units Service Consumer does 0 work Units 3 New Work Units 1 New Work Units 12 Total Work Units 7 Total Work Units
Example: M:Media integrates with Visualizing Cultures, MFA, and Dspace Overview Report Sakai Project
March 27, 2007
Funding Period: January 2004 - December 2005
Project Goals
The primary goals of the Sakai effort is to develop an open source collaboration and learning environment and develop communities of adopters and developers around Sakai to sustain the software over time.
We chose the traditional Learning Management System application space for Sakai because it is very important to have some control over the software we use for teaching, learning, and collaboration. Commercial offerings in the LMS space really tend to limit innovation because the vendor of the software controls the pace of innovation and as their customer bases grow - they are not motivated to innovate.
We understood from the beginning that not all universities would have the resources and talent to participate in the shared development of the Sakai software - but these universities in time could simply adopt and use the Sakai software - either through a commercial provider of Sakai or simply by downloading and using the software.
If you have time, there is an 11 minute video overview of the Sakai Project available at:
http://www.sakaiproject.org/media2/2006/overview/overview.htm
Participating Institutions
The Sakai Foundation has about 110 Members - both commercial and non- commercial and about 160 institutions are using Sakai in production for their collaboration and learning needs. The best way to see the Sakai community is to visit the Sakai map at www.sakaiproject.org/sakai-map/
Milestones and Deliverables
Sakai does major releases twice per year and the Sakai community determines the content of the releases. During 2006, Sakai released versions 2.2 and 2.3.
The current release page gives details of the contents of each release and is available at: http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/2.2.0/ http://source.sakaiproject.org/release/2.3.1/
The 2.2. Release completed a re-factor of the code base that was started in Sakai 2.0. Sakai 2.2 was a much cleaner and more modular release.
The Sakai Foundation hosts two annual conferences each year for the worldwide Sakai community. The June 2006 release was in Vancouver Canada and the December 2006 conference was in Atlanta Georgia - both conferences had over 500 attendees.
In addition to the worldwide conferences there were a number of smaller Sakai regional meetings in Europe, England, South Africa, and Japan.
In 2007, there will be two releases (Sakai 2.4 in June 2007 and Sakai 2.5 in December 2007) as well as worldwide conference in Amsterdam June 2007.
Contributors
According to www.ohlo.net the Sakai core plus contributed tools represents 60 active developers and the Sakai software represents about $20 million of development investment. The developers come from a wide range of institutions and are distributed around the world.
Users
Sakai runs in daily production serving about a million users around the world in 160 organizations. The Sakai adopters range in size from large statewide systems like Indiana University with 150,000 users down to small collaborative communities supporting teacher mentoring such as the KEEP Toolkit funded by the Carnegie Foundation (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/kml/keep/).
Plans for Development
The Sakai Requirements process guides Sakai development priorities. Requirements gathering is done once for each Sakai release. The Sakai community submits their requirements and then those requirements are reviewed and prioritized and the report of the requirements analysis is presented to the community. You can take a look at the Sakai requirements process in action at:
http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/f3
The Sakai Project Coordinator tracks the overall community activity and communicates activity across the community and produces the following report.
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/MGT/
Sustainability
The Sakai Foundation was founded to provide a model to sustain the Sakai efforts around the world when the initial grant-funded Sakai project was complete. The Sakai Foundation raises a million dollars per year from member fees. This money is spent on Sakai Foundation staff and supports the Sakai Foundation conferences.
The primary purpose of the Sakai staff position is to support and enhance the efforts of the volunteer Sakai community and to provide a single point of contact for people and institutions interested in Sakai.
The Sakai staff currently consists of the following positions:
• Executive Director • Membership Coordinator • Community Liason • Requirements Coordinator • Project Coordinator • QA Director • Webmaster
The Sakai Board is currently raising funds and preparing to hire a User Experience coordinator to help improve the usability of Sakai.
These positions are not generally directly involved in the development and production of the Sakai software; instead they focus on enhancing and supporting community efforts around Sakai.
Synergy Opportunities
A collaboration and learning system touches many aspects of an enterprise leading to many opportunities for collaboration.
• FLUID is a Mellon-funded effort to improve the usability of Sakai and a wide range of open source software efforts. FLUID will improve accessibility and usability for open source software by building and integrating technology that allows users to control and transform their user interface to best suit their needs. Sakai is a major participant and supporter of the FLUID effort.
• uPortal - Sakai has a goal of integration with an institutions enterprise portal. A significant amount of effort has been expended working with uPortal. This effort includes - the development of JSR-168 portlets for Sakai, WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) Producer capabilities for Sakai, RSS feeds, and JSR-168 support for Sakai.
• IMS - Sakai institutions have participates in the IMS Standards effort and Sakai has been instrumental in the development of the IMS Tool Interoperability and IMS Common Cartridge standards. These are breakthrough standards in the area of reuse of tools and content across multiple LMS systems.
Sakai has a very flexible and extensible service oriented architecture that allows for many different types of learning and collaboration oriented tools to be deployed through Sakai. This has led to some long-term relationships between Sakai and otrher communities developing learning oriented tools including:
• The Bodington LMS system has been under development since 1995 at Leeds, Oxford, and the University of the Highlands and Islands. Bodington has a number of significant innovations including the use of GuanXI to harness SAML technology (similar to Shibboleth) to provide a secure federated view of learning resources from many sources.
• LAMS is a learning design system which allows the development of learning sequences where the instructor can lead students through sequences of learning activities in a synchronous or asynchronous manner. LAMS 1.0 was integrated into Sakai 2.1 and work is just being completed on a basic integration of LAMS 2.0 into Sakai 2.4. We are exploring options with LAMS to produce a much tighter and richer integration between Sakai and LAMS to allow both systems to reuse each other's tools natively.
Looking Forward
The Sakai Foundation, Sakai software, and Sakai community are very solid at this point in time. We have successfully launched Sakai and matured the software over a three year period. Sakai runs solidly in production at a number of sites and we have systems and processes in place to move the software forward.
The next steps are to enhance functionality and move to a point where we are truly starting to innovate beyond the commercial offerings in this space. Enhanced support for standards for tool and data interoperability are a critical element in achieving the next set of goals for Sakai.
This report was prepared by Dr. Charles Seevrance ([email protected])
SEASR - Retreat Report
An analytical platform for the analysis of rich media content.
Project Name and Start Date
SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) June 2007
Project URL
Coming soon!
Brief description of project goals
SEASR will deliver a means of addressing the challenges of transforming information into knowledge by constructing the software bridges that are required to move from the unstructured and semi-structured data world to the structured data world. We aim to make content collections more useful by integrating two well-known research and development frameworks--NCSA's Data-To-Knowledge (D2K), and IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)--into an easily usable analytical platform that researchers in any discipline, but particularly the humanistic fields, can easily learn and adapt for their own scholarly research.
This project will focus on developing, integrating, deploying, and sustaining a set of reusable and expandable software components and a supporting framework, SEASR that will benefit a broad set of data mining applications for scholars in humanities.
The key goals established for this effort are a set of software centric directives:
• Support the development of a state-of-the-art software environment for unstructured data management and analysis of digital libraries, repositories and archives, as well as educational platforms that are expected to contribute to many of the humanities breakthroughs of the 21st century. • Support the continued development, expansion, and maintenance of end-to-end software system - user interfaces, workflow engines, data management, analysis and visualization tools, collaborative tools, and other software integrated into a complete environment SEASR - to bring the full power of data analytics to the scholars. • Support education and training for use of this software environment for analysis through workshops to promote its usage among scholars.
There are two important additional benefits from the development of SEASR: the creation of a vibrant digital humanities community, and technology transfer between diverse disciplines that traditionally have had little interaction. SEASR will create a venue for technology and information exchange, offering scholars access to an interdisciplinary collaboration among humanists, computer scientists, and high-performance computer specialists.
Participating Institutions and key people
• Michael Welge, [email protected]. National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PI, Project and Technical Leadership • Loretta Auvil, [email protected]. National Center for Supercomputing Applications University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Co-PI, Community Outreach and Applications • John Unsworth, [email protected]. Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences (GSLIS) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Co-PI and Community Advisor • Duane Searsmith, [email protected]. University of Illinois, Technical Lead • Tara Bazler, [email protected]. User Experience Group, Indiana University Usability Evaluation • Tim Cole, [email protected]. Mathematics Librarian and Professor of Library Administration University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Community Advisor
Highlights
* Background References
Welge, M., L. Auvil, A. Shirk, C. Bushell, P. Bajcsy, D. Cai, T. Redman, D. Clutter, R. Aydt, and D. Tcheng. (2003). Data to Knowledge (D2K) Automated Learning Group, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. D2K: (alg.ncsa.uiuc.edu/do/tools/d2k/)
Downie, S., Unsworth, B., Yu, B., Tcheng, D., Rockwell, G. & Ramsay. S. (2005). A revolutionary approach to humanities computing?: Tools development and the D2K data-mining framework. In proceeding of the ACH/ALLC 2005 conference. M2K: (www.music-ir.org/)
Ferrucci, D. & Lally, A. (2004). UIMA: an architectural approach to unstructured information processing in the corporate research environment. Natural Language Engineering, 10:3-4, pp. 327--348. UIMA: (www.research.ibm.com/UIMA/)
Milestones and deliverables
FY07-Q3
o Announcement of the SEASR research and development activity at International Digital Humanities conference and solicit feedback from the Community. o User centric activities - functional, data-related, user interface, and usability requirements from individuals, focus groups, and on-going community efforts. o First meeting to review project plan with Advisory Group o Finalization of software infrastructure design and develop plan
FY07-Q4
o Integrate D2K components for Nora into chosen SEASR framework o Release SEASR User pre-alpha 1 to advisors for review
Community Plan
We plan to select advisors who have expertise in humanities computing and experience with relevant software development projects. Selected advisors will have to agree to make one site visit a year and provide a written evaluation of the current state of the project. The feedback provided by these expert advisors will be used to expand the horizons of SEASR. These evaluations will also be included in project reports to the Mellon Foundation. We plan to engage at least three distinguished non-UIUC advisors along with the listed UIUC advisors. They will be selected and their commitments will be obtained no later than Year 1, Q1. The non-UIUC advisors will be provided with travel expenses and an honorarium will be provided for their written evaluation of the project. To date, the community advisors are listed below, we plan to expand the list to include other Andrew W Mellon funded efforts:
• David Ferrucci, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center • Eric W. Brown, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center • John Wilbanks, Science Commons • Vernon Burton, Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign • J. Stephen Downie, GSLIS, University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign
Sustainability Plan
Our vision includes the formation of a community that can extend and support SEASR going forward. We want to engage both researchers and their supporting institutions in the adoption of SEASR prior to its formal release. We plan to proceed with this in two different ways. First, we will gather user community developer support through advisors. Second, we will request representatives from the content infrastructure maintainers to review SEASR and coordinate with their library project in exchange for a small level of funding.
Synergy opportunities with other projects
To ensure a strong synergy between scholars and technologist in the development of SEASR, we plan to interact with as many end users and development teams as possible. Below is a partial list of end users and developers we plan to contact. If you would like to share your use cases or development experiences, participate in a technology collaboration, or learn more, please contact Loretta Auvil, Application and Community Lead for SEASR ([email protected]).
End Users
Caroline Haythornthwaite, UIUC, Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland (Nora and Monk), Martin Mueller, Northwestern University (Monk and Wordhoard) Steve Ramsay, University of Nebraska (Nora and Monk), Martha Nell Smith, University of Maryland (Nora and Monk), Sara Steger, University of Georgia (Monk)
Designer/Developers
John Norstad, Northwestern University (Monk, Wordhoard), Bill Parod, Northwestern University (Monk, Wordhoard), Geoffrey Rockwell, McMaster University (Monk, TAPOR), Stefan Sinclair, McMaster University (Monk, TAPOR, HYPERPO), Thorny Staples, University of Virginia (FEDORA), Paul Watry, Cheshire (National Text Mining Centre)
The Shibboleth Project Formed spring 2000, aligned with SAML at the outset First releases spring 2003
URL: http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ http://www.incommonfederation.org/
Project Goals: To provide a payload format and protocol for the interrealm exchange of attributes. To provide the additional capabilities necessary to manage broadly multiparty federations, including metadata management, attribute release and acceptance controls, etc. To deploy true operational infrastructure of an inter-institutional trust fabric based on the technical developments.
Participating institutions and key people: Steven Carmody, Brown – Project Manager Scott Cantor, Ohio State, - Lead architect Key developers at Georgetown, USC, Washington, Switzerland, UK, Australia, etc.
Milestones and deliverables • Shib 1.3 widely deployed; 1.2 still common • Along the way, other capabilities added: • ADFS compatibility for WS-Fed, (MS $) • Eauthentication certification (with waiver form:)) • Shib 2.0 completes the SAML+Shib integration • More compatible with COTS SAML 2.0 products than they are with each other • A Shib/SAML to TCP/IP analogy isn’t bad; Shib adds multi-party federation support through metadata, ARPS, etc. • Also eases support for n-tier, non-web and other capabilities • Alpha in April • Support for the attribute ecosystem • attribute handling, including policy, in both SP and IdP • designed to be reusable for other protocols (eg CardSpace) • sets stage for further work on multiple attribute sources, reputation management, etc. • All Java SP (in addition to current Java/Apache), easing integration for some applications • Trust management • PKI still seems too hard, even at the simpler enterprise level • Supports a broad set of trust choices – CA’s, certs, plain keys, managing site metadata (naming, acquisition, validating) • A product of years of painful experience ☺ • InCommon • US R&E Federation • www.incommon.org • Members join a 501(c)3 • Addresses legal, LOA, shared attributes, business proposition, etc issues • Approximately 50 members and growing • A low percentage of national Shib use… • InCommon Basics • Federating software - Shib 1.2+ (other possibilities in the future) • Shared attributes and schema - eduPerson right now • Levels of authentication • POP (participant operational practices) • InCommon Bronze and Silver will map to LOA 1 & 2 • Management • Steering committee of members IT executives • Operations staffed by Internet2 • InCommon Uses • Access control to content • Popular content – Ruckus, CDigix, etc • Scholarly content – Google, OCLC WorldCat, Elsevier, JSTOR, EBSCO, Atyphon, etc. • Downloads – Microsoft • Access to external services • Student travel, charitable giving, web learning and testing, plagiarism testing service, etc. • Allure for alumni services and other internal businesses • Student loans, student testing, graduate school admissions, etc. • Access to national services • The National Science Digital Library • The Teragrid pilot • NSF Fastlane • Peering of federations, both internationally underactive discussion
Community: National standard for federation in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, France and ten other countries. Installations in the UK cover entire higher ed, K-12 and further education, with more than five million users in the federation already. State university federations in Texas, California (two), Maryland and others. Shibbed applications include wikis, moodle, blogs, IM, wireless access, fedora, sakai, MAMS, Blackboard, etc.
Sustainability: Shib 2.0 likely a plateau product for a while. Metadata may evolve and some new capabilities may be added. There exist development centers, typically funded by national R&E agencies, in the UK and Australia. Internet2 intends to provide a small core for project coordination; training and outreach are largely self-sustaining already.
Integrated Approach to Identity/Privilege Management
Major Software Components Shibboleth – interrealm exchange of attributes, including authentication, entitlements, etc. Grouper - group management, including creation, automated maintenance, etc Signet – privilege management, including delegation, constraints, prerequisites, expirations, etc
URL: http://middleware.internet2.edu/dir/groups/grouper/ http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet/ http://middleware.internet2.edu/
Project Goals: Shibboleth is part of a larger “attribute ecosystem” which addresses the complex set of issues in creating and managing privileges and entitlements for access control across enterprise, federated, and virtual organization sets of applications. Two other major parts of that ecosystem are Signet and Grouper, which allow sources of authority to administer privileges to others. They are intended to be enterprise level middleware services, positioned to serve academic and administrative needs, with the institutional buy-in for sustainability and an orientation towards research and instructional missions.
Signet and Grouper have been developed as part of the Internet2 Middleware work, with NSF funding. Signet is a privilege manager, allow users to pick people and assign them privileges for use within enterprise-class applications, with a rich calculus of control and capacity to serve multiple applications with a role-based model of management. Grouper complements Signet by allowing groups to be formed and automatically maintained, and assigned privileges and roles. Taken together, Shibboleth, Signet and Grouper provide much of what is needed to provision the services of effectively granting privileges to others, and having those granted easily exercise those privileges in a federated community of institutions.
We are now beginning to apply this core of identity and privilege management tools to a variety of collaborative applications. We expect the outputs to be “plumbed” instances of open source (and proprietary) collaboration tools, where plumbed connotes that the applications use enterprise, federated and perhaps p2p infrastructure for their authentication and authorization needs. The collaboration tools are being selected on an opportunistic basis, and include both asynchronous tools (Wikis, web-based file sharing, shared calendaring, etc.) and real-time tools (IM, audioconferencing, videoconferencing, etc.)
Note that the integration does extend to p2p trust mechanisms, such as Cardspace, Higgins, and OpenId. The target environment would not only integrate these collaborative apps, in identity and privilege management, but would also provide both federated and virtual organization services, where the coupling of collaborative apps to the target community is tighter and includes domain science privilege management.
Participating institutions and key people: Lynn McRae and Stanford University Tom Barton, Univ of Chicago RL Bob Morgan, University of Washington Michael Gettes, Internet2 Cornell, Kansas University, Manchester University, Kent, Wisconsin
Milestones and deliverables
Both Signet and Grouper are in 1.0+ versions. Each is under active development with support from Internet2. The Signet model is built on provisioning connectors from Signet to applications and to other middleware components. Right now the set of provisioning connectors is limited, but it does include an LDAP connector, which is broadly useful.
Community: Signet and Grouper each currently have very small bases in deployment, though the base of Signet has been deployed on an enterprise base for several years. Several institutions are queued for deployment in the next few months. A Signet/Grouper workshop held last fall had 125 attendees from 67 different institutions; many of those campuses are now evaluating their use. There is also prototyping of a stand-along identity management platform that couples Signet, Grouper and Shibboleth into a platform for servicing the identity and privilege management needs of virtual organizations, allowing them to participate in an attribute and federated infrastructure. VO’s will be able to utilize this platform if users are located at institutions that do not participate in the integrated identity management infrastructure.
Sustainability: Currently, the development community for Signet and Grouper derive most of their support from Internet2 (through a mix of member dues and NSF grants), with the UK JISC agency recently supporting additional development. Each tool is closer to the critical mass of adoption level, but may not be ready for self-sustaining development yet. It is likely that a benevolent organization will need to subsidize both tools for perhaps two or three more years til adoption reaches self-sustaining levels or commercial tools embody equivalent approaches.
Summary Report for http://simile.mit.edu/ 2007 Mellon Research in Technology Retreat March 29th & 30th in Princeton, NJ
Project Goals
The Simile Project aims to deliver practical tools to address the staggering growth in the complexity of managing scholarly digital repositories.
Digital repositories are emerging across the spectrum of scholarship from the personal collections of specialized researchers through to the large-scale repositories of research institutions. The complexity of cataloging these collections is exploding with diversity and richness of catalog data. The Simile Project aims to provide practical, immediately useful tools to scholars, repository managers, and institutions to manage this complexity and lower its costs.
We focus on this problem by creating a broad spectrum of tools. We release these tools rapidly to help assure that we capture immediate feedback about which tools are maximally helpful. All our tools are released as Open Source Software and we can use the vibrancy of the resulting developer community as another means to validate our work. This approach helps keep us honest and helps to build the community that will sustain the work going forward.
There is one particularly knotty problem in the space that should be highlighted. As smaller collections closer to individual research communities emerge each community is emerging a metadata model that fits their local needs. Collections now arrive at the library door with a rich but exceptional catalog. Enabling, preserving, and using unpredictable and diverse catalogs is a key goal of the Simile agenda. Contributors & Institutional Relationships
Funding: Mellon Foundation, Research in Technology MIT Office of the Provost in Partnership with the MIT Libraries
Principle Investigators: MacKenzie Smith – Associate Director for Technology MIT Libraries David Karger – Professor MIT CSAIL Eric Miller – CEO Zepheira, Research Scientist MIT CSAIL
Key Contributors: David Huynh, Ben Hyde, Ryan Lee, Stefano Mazzocchi, Andrew Plotkin, Richard Rogers
Highlights
We have made substantial progress over the last year on a number of aspects of the problem. We have had some delightful success putting tools into hands of individual scholars, and aggregating metadata into library tools.
Highlights - Timeline
The first of these was Timeline. Here are two examples. In this next figure1 is a chronology of King John’s life built by J.J Crump of the History Department at the University of Washington.
1 See: http://home.myuw.net/jjcrump/Timelines/JohnItinerary2.html William C. Warters of Wayne State University used Timeline to illustrate the emergence of campus mediation systems.
There are many more timeline2 examples you can browse at the project’s wiki. The small chart shows that at least five thousand sites now use timeline; this number is a lower bound since it only counts sites that fetch the code from us each time.
What timeline taught us is that tools with a much lower barrier to entry (that run on the browser rather than the server, for example) would get much faster adoption. More importantly we discovered that this increases other key metrics. For example small collection owners can move more quickly and are more vocal, casual, and straight-forward with their feedback. The increased energy in the project in turn lends vitality to the open source community and hence increases the long-term sustainability of the project.
Timeline is only a single view on a single kind of data. It was built to provide a time-oriented view for our server-side collection search tool called Longwell. Building on what Timeline taught us, we built a lighter weight search tool; a client side faceted browser called Exhibit.
Highlights – Exhibit
The second tool we released, Exhibit, provides a way for individual scholars or small communities to share their collections on the Web. Here is an example of Exhibit being used to organize the talks given at the International Scholarly Communications Conference3.
Exhibit provides a significant portion of the data views found in our server-side faceted browsing tool Longwell, e.g. (maps, scatter
2 http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Category:Example_timeline 3 http://labs.ingenta.com/2006/12/iscc/ plots, timelines, and configurable html/tabular views). Exhibit, while younger than Timeline, is showing steady growth.
We have learned a few things from Exhibit. The number of digital collections emerging out there is staggering. The second is that the diversity of catalog forms out there is getting greater at an astonishing rate. Both make our problem harder.
Highlights – Remixing Writ Large
Consider this timeline. Each dot represents one 17th and 18th century court case. The court cases are drawn from a digital repository containing the text of the proceedings of the Old Bailey. Those texts in turn were drawn, by hand, from the scanned images of the court records. There are thousands of cases. This is modern scholarship. Like traditional scholarship it stands on the library collections; but in this case the collections are completely digital.
Enabling work such as this is part of our job. Capturing works such as these is another part.
But most thought provoking is how each such work has the potential to lay new cataloging overlays onto existing collections. Managing that diversity is clearly our job as well.
Milestones & Deliverables We are in excellent alignment with our original project plan in spite of both some serious hiring challenges and the addition of the work to reach out to smaller collectors. Our most challenging problem has been how to make these tools scale to larger collections. We believe we now have that problem in hand. We have captured one large performance improvement and have a large piece of work in progress that we believe will deliver another. In the last year we released substantially improved version of most of our tools as well as a number of additional tools. A huge effort was devoted to making both Longwell and Piggybank more robust. That has enabled the adoption 3rd party adoption of Longwell. For example the Metamedia group at MIT is now using it to manage one of their collections.
Our number one target customer for these tools is DSpace and we were pleased to show the DSpace community a way they could quickly adopt the faceted browsing model this year. We call that tool DWell, since it is a variant of Longwell. It allows the DSpace UI to add faceted browsing without a complete revision of their existing codebase, UI, or data models and so will be easy for institutions to adopt.
Our primary goal for the coming year is to close out the work on the project plan with particular emphasis on three aspects of that work. Finishing the performance, fast inferencing, and building out our community of users and developers.
Community
Vibrant open source communities require contributors across a spectrum of involvement. The highest value contributors stand on a pyramid of less intimately involved contributors. First you need lots of downloads, then lots of installs, then folks reading your mailing lists, etc. before you finally begin to get systems in production and developers who volunteer to become contributors. So we are delighted that we now have some active committers on the project from who came up through that process. We track the health of the community thru a number of charts such as the above. For example here’s a chart showing that we have, out there, about a dozen requests a week to pull the Gadget from our source code repository.
Sustainability
This work will survive if we manage to archive three goals. If a vibrant community of users and developers forms around it that community will strive to keep it alive. If the problem we are solving, i.e. addressing the need for tools to manage the exploding scale and diversity of the digital repository problem, is really a problem. If the solution we advance becomes one of the preferred ways to address the problem. We are quite optimistic that all three are coming together.
Synergy
We are impressed and even a bit jealous of the work Zotero has done building on some of ideas we first demonstrated in Piggybank. Its vertical architecture is a fascinating contrast with Piggybank’s horizontal architecture. Scrapping data off web sites remains a difficult problem that continues to demand expert skills. It is clear there is a network effect waiting to happen around some repository of scraping scripts. How to create that hub while taking to heart the example that Zotero’s verticality gives is a puzzle. We were quite pleased to see that our friends at Sakai adopted Timeline. We are currently discussing with Fedora how our AJAX tools might be usefully integrated with their very large scale repository work.
We have deliberately avoided mention so far of RDF and the Semantic Web. It is nice that we have transitioned from advocacy of a particular technology to delivering value to users. Our team built none of the examples shown above and we are particularly pleased about that. It’s a huge step forward for us to be working with actual users rather than trying to predict what those users might want. We believe that much of this success has depended on leveraging RDF throughout the Simile tool chain, but we acknowledge that for the users of these tools that matters not… and we continue to focus on the ends rather than the means. Sophie - Retreat Report
A powerful, extremely easy-to-use authoring environment for multimedia scholarly content
Project Name and Start Date: Sophie 1 July 2004
Project URL: http://sophieproject.org/
Project Goals:
The aim of the Sophie project is to reinvent reading and writing in the digital era. Sophie Author enables people to create robust, elegant, networked, rich-media documents without knowledge of programming or the need to master complicated high-end assembly tools such as Flash. Sophie is open-source under a BSD license and currently runs on Macintosh, Windows and Linux.
Participating Institution and Responsible Person:
Sophie is a project of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at The School of Cinematic Arts at The University of Southern California, under the direction of Dean Elizabeth Monk Daley. Sophie is the vision of Bob Stein, the developer of the original Criterion series and TK3
Milestones and Deliverables:
Sophie was funded in two separate grants from the Mellon Foundation: a second grant became necessary when the project underwent a significant expansion in scope during year 1. The past twelve months have seen substantial progress toward the objectives of both grants, culminating with the release of Sophie Early Release, in March 2007. Sophie Early Release includes all features described in the first grant except the Sophie Reader and key deliverables from the second grant including the Sophie Server, OKI integration and printing. Contingent on additional funding, the schedule for completion of Sophie 1.0 is as follows:
• April - June: carefully document Sophie, as well as stabilize the current feature set, build Sophie Reader • July - September: complete all 1.0 features and release 1.0 Beta version • October - December: testing and release of Sophie 1.0
The One Laptop Per Child organization has committed to putting Sophie on the XO machine (aka $100 laptop) Sophie would provide a content-assembly tool that OLPC now lacks. Our hope is to get Sophie running well on that machine by the time of its August launch (on six million machines).
The expansion in project scope is attributable to some important conceptual advances: 1. About a year into the project we began to conceive of documents not just as a series of pages, but also as canvases with dynamic windows. This may not seem obvious or important now, but we believethat this will help, over time, to resolve the long-standing tension between the strict linearity of pages (inherited from print) and the hyper-textual promise of the networked document. 2. Via the Sophie Server, Sophie documents now stream from the internet, allowing new forms of collaboration on authorship as well as more flexible distribution. 3. Thanks to the Sophie Server, Sophie documents now contain live dynamic text fields such that a comment written in the margin of a Sophie document by one author will be displayed immediately in the same place for anyone else reading that document.
Community
Sophie is just now achieving early release, so a community has not yet formed. Howeve, Sophie has been selected as a Google "summer of code project" (as part of the Squeak community) so we have hopes that a community of early adopters will form this summer. A preliminary website has been built to with basic documentation and mechanisms for downloading the latest version.
JA-SIG uPortal
From JA-SIG, the global consortium promoting open technology for higher education, uPortal is an open source, enterprise portal collaboratively developed by higher-education institutions and commercial affiliates. Utilizing Java, Extensible Markup Language (XML), Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technologies, the uPortal framework enables open standards-based integration with authentication and single sign-on middleware (such as JA-SIG CAS), academic and administrative applications, and collaborative tools that support campus communities. uPortal supports customized layout and content subscription and integrates with JA-SIG HyperContent, a web-based content management system designed for website and portlet-based publishing.
Project Name and Start Date JA-SIG uPortal, October, 2001
Project URLs http://www.ja-sig.org, http://www.uportal.org
Brief Description of Project Goals uPortal was created to provide a free, open source, enterprise portal tailored to the needs of higher education. uPortal is based on open technology standards, a key requirement for higher education. In addition, uPortal delivers features that are of particular value to colleges and universities. One key feature, for example, is the authorization framework, “Groups and Permissions (GAP).” GAP provides a level of granularity for specifying permissions within the portal that goes far beyond the more common role-based construct found in other portals. This capability is well-suited to the decentralized nature of our typical educational institutions. Moreover, GAP principals may be drawn from a variety of back-end directory services and applications. Secondly, uPortal’s layout management provides administrators the ability to “push” portal content to users in tabs or tab fragments, as well as enabling users to subscribe to personalized content, as permitted.
With the essential goals of uPortal realized, future objectives aim to improve the uPortal user experience for end users and administrators, to keep pace with technology standards and other developments, and to position the portal as an integration platform for a wider variety of applications and services.
Milestones and Deliverables Last 12 months:
• The first uPortal 3.0 release candidate was made available for download and QA in November, 2006. Institutions have been providing feedback, bug reports, and requests. • uPortal 2.5.3 was released, offering WSRP support, fixes to Distributed Layout Management, improved memory management, and multi-threaded rendering of portlets. • JA-SIG initiated its new Membership Program to formalize broadly representative governance of JA-SIG and to ensure sustainability and growth for the organization and its projects.
CY 2007 Anticipated We anticipate the following developments in CY 2007:
• uPortal 3.0 RC2, scheduled for April, will feature a significant simplification of the codebase (upgrades to the Pluto portlet container and to Maven 2) • uPortal 3.0 RC3, scheduled for June, will further increase ease of deployment by removing the need for in-depth configuration of the target database and other properties. These changes will also benefit uPortal migration efforts. Cumulative bug fixes will be available for each release. • uPortal 2.6 (2Q ‘07) will feature exciting drag-and-drop user layout preferences features (already available in uP3.0) built here on the popular Dojo Ajax framework. Group management will be improved. Enhancements from Unicon’s Academus portal (a commercial offering based on uPortal) will be merged into the base uPortal code. • uPortal 2.7 (CY07) will contain enhancements to Distributed Layout Management and other features from SunGard HE’s Luminis portal (also based on uPortal), as well as a full-featured internationalization framework. • Finally, in CY07, uPortal will fall under the governance of a new Project Steering Committee model established in coordination with the JA-SIG Member Program.
Community Current Status
• uPortal is implemented by over 450 small-to-large institutions world-wide. An additional 400 instances have been implemented by third-party portals based on the uPortal codebase. • uPortal mailing lists are actively used by users and developers on a daily basis. Support for uPortal issues and questions is available within hours via the community listservs. • To date, thirty institutions have joined JA-SIG’s new membership program as Institutional Members. Three vendors have joined as Commercial Affiliates.
Contributors
During the past year, contributors to uPortal 2.x and 3.0 have come from a number of institutions and commercial affiliates, including Rutgers University, Unicon, Texas Tech University, University of British Columbia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia University, Yale University, SunGard Higher Education, Northern Arizona University, and University of Maryland.
Sustainability
In its early phases of development, uPortal made significant strides through funding from the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation. More recently, the uPortal community—a combination of colleges, universities and commercial partners—has provided ongoing development and support. New uPortal implementations are announced virtually every month from around the world.
As discussed in an earlier section, this past year JA-SIG adopted a membership model offering benefits to institutional and commercial members. The revenue from membership fees and the increased participation from strategic stakeholders are expected to give JA-SIG and its projects more flexibility in achieving organizational goals and reaching product milestones on an ongoing basis.
Synergy Opportunities with Other Projects uPortal, by nature, is an aggregation and integration platform for the institution. As such, it lends itself towards integration with countless other applications and services across the spectrum of higher education, both internal to the institution and beyond its walls.
Individual uPortal implementations have been designed to integrate with JA-SIG’s other projects, namely CAS single-sign-on and HyperContent web content management. On many campuses uPortal has been integrated with course management systems such as Sakai, Moodle, and Blackboard. Administrative users have integrated the portal with campus ERP systems, among other local applications. Online services supporting the portlet standard (JSR-168) can be integrated easily with the latest uPortal releases. Portlets running on remote servers can be hosted locally in uPortal 2.5.3 via the WSRP standard.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – RIT Program VUE 2.0 Project Update
David Kahle March 19, 2007
Project Visual Understanding Environment 2.0
Duration October 2005 – October 2007
Website http://vue.uit.tufts.edu/
Participants The VUE 2.0 project is a collaborative effort involving staff from Tufts University Academic Technology and MIT’s Academic Computing with faculty participation from both institutions. David Kahle, Tufts University Director of Academic Technology, is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the VUE project and Jeff Merriman, MIT Associate Director for Software Development and Strategy, is the Co-PI. In addition to the core project team, faculty representing a number of academic disciplines, including art history, computer science, medicine and public health, continue to contribute directly to VUE’s evolution by providing compelling, real-world use cases involving teaching and research with digital information.
Overview & Goals Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) project based at Tufts University is focused on creating flexible tools and processes for integrating digital resources into teaching, learning and research. Designed with the higher education community in mind, VUE provides a compelling and accessible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information in support of scholarship. VUE’s support for establishing and communicating meaningful relationships among ideas and digital resources is unique compared to other educational and research applications.
The scope of work for the VUE 2.0 project focuses on the following four areas with the primary goal of enhancing scholarship with digital information.
1. Position VUE as a flexible interface to a greatly expanded collection of digital libraries and repositories.
2. Promote interactive teaching with VUE, by providing map-based presentation tools.
3. Advance the analysis and evaluation of conceptual understanding expressed in VUE maps by adding support for semantic mapping techniques based upon ontologies and RDF.
4. Reduce barriers to integrating VUE into workflows involving learning management systems such as Sakai.
This additional functionality builds upon a number of VUE’s existing tools and is made possible by VUE’s open technical architecture.
Progress & Status The VUE project has made steady progress toward the four project goals. As a step towards the release of version 2.0 in the fall of 2007, last summer saw the release VUE 1.5, which introduced a new user interface and enabled dynamic linking to online digital repositories from within VUE. In addition, the first phase of development for both the semantic mapping and presentation components of VUE 2.0 and the technical specification for integrating VUE into the Sakai collaboration and learning environment have been completed. While we had intended to create additional point releases of VUE corresponding to each new feature set, it has became apparent that it is impossible to cleanly separate the work related to semantic mapping, support for ontologies and presentation tools. As an example, the architecture required to style a VUE node or link is shared among the semantic and presentation tools. As a result, the semantic and presentation tools as well as VUE’s ability to connect with Sakai will be a part of version 2.0 scheduled for release in the fall of 2007. Below is a summary of accomplishments to-date and an overview of planned future activity.
New User Interface Model & Support for Images Rather than attempt to force fit VUE 2.0 tools into VUE’s earlier graphical interface, we have designed and implemented a new, contemporary user interface for version 1.5. By incorporating user-configurable floating pallets for presenting both map content and GUI elements, VUE now presents a flexible platform for expressing new feature sets without cluttering the screen with unwanted tools and windows. The figure below illustrates the flexibility of VUE’s new user interface. Tool and content palettes may be used independently depending on the work context and may be docked together and collapsed to reveal more of the underlying map.
As is fitting for an application with increased access to digital collections such as ARTstor, VUE now displays image content. Thumbnail images of search results now appear in the content palette, previews of image content is available through the info palette and users may now drag and drop images directly onto the map canvas. Support for images is also an important prerequisite for extending VUE as a presentation tool.
Figure 1 Flexible content panel and image support in VUE 1.5.
Enhanced Content Access & Management VUE’s new user interface was put to its first test in support of the enhanced data source management features. VUE 1.5, which delivers the major functionality outlined in the “Enhanced Data Source Management” section of the VUE 2.0 grant proposal, was delivered to the public this past July. The focus of this work was to facilitate user access to a wider range of digital collections than previously available, thereby increasing the value of VUE as a content mapping and management application. VUE users can now discover and add available digital repositories directly within VUE by selecting the “add resource” option of the content palette. Behind the scenes, VUE queries an online registry of available OKI digital repository implementations. There are currently over a dozen online resources now available via VUE, including collections from MIT’s Visualizing Cultures, the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts Artifact, ARTstor, JSTOR, Merlot and Connexions. Federating searching across these content sources is enabled through VUE’s new search interface.
Presentation Tools We have made significant progress in the design and development of VUE 2.0’s presentation features. Fundamental to our approach is pursuing a synergistic coupling of VUE’s mapping and presentation functions. Rather than append a separate PowerPoint-like presentation module to VUE, we are leveraging VUE’s existing mapping metaphor and GUI for authoring interactive presentations. At this point we have completed the first phase of development for this component of the application. The 1.6 alpha build of VUE allows authors to present VUE nodes in full screen mode along with preset styles. Using VUE’s slide viewer the content nesting within nodes as well as groups of nodes may be organized for presentation. The figure below illustrates how a single VUE node selected on the map looks in presentation design mode.
Figure 2 Node content as pr esented in the slide viewer.
Semantic Mapping Tools Development also continues on VUE’s semantic mapping functionality. The structure of VUE maps and user-defined node metadata can now be exported as simple connectivity matrices that can be further analyzed using common statistical packages. This enables large, intricate maps to be evaluated and compared using statistical methods. Connectivity matrices also support visual comparison within VUE. Using VUE’s new analyze feature, multiple maps may be merged together to examine similarities and differences. In the merged map in Figure 3 the frequency of occurrence of any given node across three distinct maps is indicated by color. Figure 3 Result of three maps analyzed for simila r content.
Related to ontology support, the technical specification and initial interface designs for this functionality is complete. VUE will now open RDF files and work continues on loading and visually styling the Fedora RDF-S collection ontology. VUE 2.0 will provide support for ontologies defined in OWL Lite which will allow for mapping activities constrained to a common set of object types and links.
Integration with Learning Management Systems Although the Sakai/LMS integration is the last deliverable of the VUE 2.0 project, scheduled for completion in September 2007, design specifications of the functional areas outlined in the grant proposal are complete and VUE-Sakai development activities are under way. Our goal is to demonstrate VUE’s ability to interoperate with learning management systems by implementing the relevant OKI OSIDs for the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. The focus of this work involves integrating VUE with the resource management components of the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment so that users may build and publish VUE maps to and from Sakai repositories. This integration will require exposure of Sakai’s repository and course management services, the development of appropriate DR OSID drivers, and related content typing activities. An overview of the technical architecture for VUE- Sakai integration was presented at the December 2006 Sakai.
Community & Sustainability An open-source application built with OKI software standards, VUE greatly facilitates individual access and adoption and enables integration with other information systems. VUE has been downloaded by thousands of users from around the globe and external partners have started to either extend or integrate VUE. Examples include the CSU Digital Market Place project which contributed code to export VUE maps as IMS compliant resource lists and a development team from the Medbiquitous Consortium, who has used VUE’s mapping interface to design patient cases for healthcare education.
The broader VUE community includes partnerships with Fedora, Sakai and a number of publishers that have made their digital collections available to VUE through plug-ins defined by the OKI digital repository framework. As discussed earlier, a focus of the VUE 2.0 project is publishing and connecting to content within the Sakai collaboration and learning environment and Fedora digital repositories. Ongoing collaboration with both of these projects is mutually beneficial. Through tighter integration, VUE adopters gain access to a greater variety of content and Sakai and Fedora users gain a flexible, graphical interface for working with their digital content.
While VUE would benefit from additional developers contributing to the project and extending VUE functionality, the priority at this time is increasing adoption of VUE by students, researchers and educators. Our approach to-date has been to work closely with numerous scholars on implementing VUE into their teaching and research activities. This effort has produced a number of compelling use cases showcasing how VUE can directly support teaching, learning and research. An important next step for the project is to develop a communication and outreach strategy in combination with additional educational materials highlighting VUE’s value as a tool for scholarship.
Synergistic Opportunities VUE has cultivated and benefited from collaboration with a number of Mellon sponsored projects. The scope of work defined as part of the VUE 2.0 project is based upon synergies with the Open Knowledge Initiative, Fedora, and Sakai. The value of future collaboration is perhaps greatest with producers of digital material and digital libraries looking to provide their audiences with a rich set of tools for working and thinking with their content. Further integration of VUE into learning management systems and instructional authoring processes that would benefit from visual approaches to the design and structuring of educational content and activities is another area rich in possibilities. Finally, partnerships with scholars looking to advance their teaching and research with digital information in a systematic fashion would benefit from VUE’s visual and analytical tools and methods. Such additional collaboration with researchers and educators would further refine VUE and increase its value for the academic community. Visual Understanding Environment 2.0 Andrew W. Mellon RIT Retreat 2007
David Kahle March 29, 2007 Content Mapping Resource Access & Management Links & Annotations Guides & Pathways Semantic Mapping & Analysis Presentation Tools VUE Examples VUE Examples VUE Examples Thank You!
Project Name and Start Date Zotero, October 2006
Project URL http://www.zotero.org
Brief description of project goals Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps scholars gather, organize, and analyze primary and secondary sources (citations, full texts, images, and other objects), and lets them share the results of their research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older software that assisted the scholarly process (reference managers like EndNote)— the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications, like the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; using semantic web technologies it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other scholarly object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). In addition, it works offline (e.g., in an archive without WiFi) as well as online (information must be entered manually, of course, when offline).
The 1.0 release of Zotero already provides advanced functionality for gathering, organizing, and scanning one’s research, as well as significant import/export capabilities (including integration with Word and an API for communication with any program or service on the web). In 2007, Zotero users will gain the ability to share and collaborate on their collections with other users through an exchange server, and receive recommendations and feeds of new resources that might be of interest to them. In short, over the next year Zotero will expand from an already helpful bibliographic browser extension into a full-fledged tool for digital research and scholarly communication.
Participating Institutions and Key People Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, http://chnm.gmu.edu Dan Cohen, Co-PI, Co-Director, [email protected], http://www.dancohen.org Roy Rosenzweig, Co-PI, [email protected] Sean Takats, Co-Director, [email protected] Josh Greenberg, Co-Director, [email protected] Dan Stillman, Lead Developer, [email protected]
Highlights Just four months after its initial public release, Zotero was named one of the “Best Free Software Applications” by PC Magazine. Adoption by researchers has been rapid—in February 2007 we registered 102,874 unique IP addresses of Zotero users (the software checks daily for updates). George Mason University and other campuses in the United States and abroad are considering making Zotero their officially supported research tool, and the American Council of Learned Societies plans to distribute information about Zotero to its constituent societies for widespread promotion among scholars. We have received uniformly positive reviews and write-ups across the higher ed and technology press, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Linux.com (“If you spend most of your time doing research on the Web, you need Zotero”), and in over 3,000 blog posts by academics and librarians. Although the project is very young, we are already thinking about (and have received many inquiries asking for) further extensions to the software, including support for mapping, text mining, and other tools for scholarly analysis in an age when many research collections (though not all) are digitized.
Milestones and deliverables Last 12 months • Summer 2006: Private testing of Beta 1: basic functionality with support for many libraries, JSTOR, and other scholarly databases. • October 2006: Initial public release (Beta 2): added support for dozens of sites, import from EndNote, RefWorks, and other reference managers, and preliminary release of Zotero RDF (a bibliographic RDF based on various existing schemas). • January 2007: Beta 3 release: many more sites supported, added integration with Microsoft Word, ability to publish research reports in XHTML, support for abstracts, more advanced tagging system, full-text phrase searching and other advanced searching (including regular expressions), release of API for outside developers to build utilities on top of Zotero, and 11 foreign language skins. • March 2007: Beta 4 release: major addition of mode for annotating and highlighting documents saved within Zotero, accessibility enhancements including text resizing, more foreign language skins, improved methods for finding objects within one’s local library, major optimization improvements for large personal collections.
CY 2007 Anticipated • Beta 4 is our last beta; the feature set for 1.0 expanded greatly from our original plan because of significant input from our rapidly growing user community, but it is now essentially frozen. We will be out of beta shortly. • Zotero 1.1 (Spring) Adds the ability to backup and synchronize to a remote server at an institution, e.g., so that universities can store the research of their faculty and students in local repositories and allow access to that research from the library, office and home computers, or anywhere else. • Zotero 2.0/Zotero Server: (Summer/Fall) In addition to backup and remote access options, Zotero 2.0 will offer the option of synching the metadata of personal collections to a central information exchange server at GMU, thus enabling community-wide sharing, collaboration, recommendations, and feeds for books, articles, and other scholarly resources. The server, like the client, will have a set of APIs so that other scholarly tools can extract RDF-encoded information from it, and deposit information into it. • Throughout 2007, we will continue to expand the set of methods for importing from, and exporting to, a wide range of scholarly tools and collections. This spring, for instance, we will be releasing utilities (plug-ins) to synch information with Connotea and del.icio.us. These two utilities will serve as the basis for other utilities for synching to a wide range of web applications.
Community • Contributors: Beyond the core team of developers, about 30 people have contributed code, including 14 foreign language localizations, bug fixes, citation styles (CSLs), and “translators” for research websites (to allow them to seamlessly transfer information to Zotero); we have also used code from MIT’s SIMILE project to ramp up certain parts of the project. • Users: Zotero has been downloaded over 100,000 times. On our forums we have had over 2000 comments from over 600 users. Zotero, a name we adopted in part because it had no namespace competition (there was only one hit in Google for it), now appears on over 500,000 web pages and in over 3000 blog posts (according to Bloglines). • Plans for development: Users: We plan to attend meetings of scholarly associations, make presentations at universities, and evangelize Zotero through germane online communities. Developers: establish a special developer mailing list and website and reach out to key developers in other open source projects. • Progress toward those plans: Users: The Mozilla Corporation, producers of the Firefox web browser, has shown interest in featuring Zotero on its “Add-ons” site or in producing a “university” edition of Firefox with Zotero preinstalled. We have already given on-campus demos at George Washington University, Georgetown University, Catholic University, and the University of Chicago; we have upcoming presentations at Harvard, Brandeis, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Brown, Stanford, and Northwestern. Dan Cohen is presenting Zotero at the annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies in Montreal in May, and we are also presenting at the American Historical Association, Modern Language Association, and other scholarly conferences over the next year. Developers: We already have over 100 subscribers to our Google Groups Zotero-Dev mailing list and maintain an active developer site (http://dev.zotero.org) and wiki.
Sustainability • Plan: The success of the Zotero community is the most important precondition for a sustainable business model, since we need to capture mindshare as well as numerous users in higher ed who believe the software is indispensable to their scholarly work—and thus want to see further development of the project. We have envisioned a variety of methods for funding the project long-term given a large user base, including partnerships, services, and support, but are still in the early stages of the project. • Progress toward plan: As noted above, we are making very good progress with building the community of users and developers and continue to talk with academics, librarians, and administrators about how Zotero could be sustained for the long run.
Synergy opportunities with other projects • We have many synergies with SIMILE. We are already using Solvent to construct Zotero translators for sites. Zotero users will soon be able to project their collections into Timeline and Exhibit, and ultimately other visualization and faceted browsing tools like Longwell. • We are working with David Huynh from SIMILE and others at MIT to model advanced scholarly activities and how to support them, such as enabling the automatic mapping of place names within documents saved in Zotero collections. • We also have many synergies with the MOCSL group at Utah State University. We are working to exchange information about item relations (e.g., “this web page is a translation of that article”) between Zotero users, the Zotero server, and MOCSL’s Didily. With the annotation and highlighting mode we recently released, we now also have the possibility of linking to MOCSL’s Annorate. There is also the possibility of aggregating recommendations from MOCSL’s Resource Recommender and the Zotero central server. • Zotero is already extracting information from OAI-PMH, so we expect to be able to extract information from ORE as well, which would allow scholars to better make use of digital repositories (e.g., by easily grabbing information or a document from a repository exposing ORE). We plan to write a translator that will work with all Fedora repositories. • Zotero will soon include the ability to create semantically encoded syllabi, bibliographies, and research reports and post those scholarly creations to Sakai or other course or content management systems. This will, in turn, allow other users of Zotero or any other tool aware of RDF or embedded microformats (depending on the type of export) to grab with one click the underlying bibliographic information. • In concert with the OpenOffice Bibliographic Project we are producing Citation Style Language files to format Zotero citations. These CSLs (an open format written in XML) will be broadly reusable by any other software project that needs to format reference information (e.g., into MLA, Harvard, or Chicago styles).