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1) What is the purpose of the TERENA OER portal initiative? (The motivation and the high-level architectural issue)

Fundamental questions must be clarified in a white paper about:

  • how we can be different form others;
  • what kind of repository we are proposing;
  • what objects we are collecting;
  • what tools we are planning to use;
  • who the target user community is;
  • how this initiative can be positioned in the context of global and other national activities
  • and so on...

AGREEMENT

A paper must be drafted that summarizes the basic principles behind the TERENA OER portal initiative, gives a high-level view on the problem space in a European/global context, as well as define a common language, system architecture, and framework for recommendations. Potential issues must be addressed by the paper are:

  • Dealing with multiple languages
  • Understanding the users' requirements
  • Supporting national repositories (with knowledge and tools)
  • Aggregation of open materials
  • Flexible metadata schema
  • Focus on easy-to-use tools and procedures
  • Understanding on existing metadata and practices already available in the community

The paper can then be agreed and presented at LAK2013 (April 2013, in Leuven Belgium) and TNC2013 (June 2013, in Maastricht, Netherlands)

ACTION 1 on Eli Shmueli (IUCC) to draft a paper (bullet points are sufficient to start with) and circulate it on the mailing list. Others are invited to contribute.


2) TERENA OER pilot implementation (The technical issue)

Proof of Concept metadata harvesting from SWITCHCollection to the MAOR test portal has been done.Look at the URL below:

http://maor.iucc.ac.il/t_materials.php?sort_property=dateCreated&page=1&search_q=keywords%3Dmaor%26anyKeyWords%3Dtrue%26allKeyWords%3Dfalse%26exactPhraseKeyWords%3Dfalse

Lessons learned: it is technically possible, but there are issues with both a) the metadata quality and b) the openness of content.

Other metadata to harvest:

  • Vicente Goyannes (Uni Vigo) offered Campus do Mar: http://tv.campusdomar.es/oai.xml
  • Gytis Cibulskis (Kaunas University of Technology) offered ViPS records archive

The next steps we should take are:

  • Start small with sharing and aggregating of (fully) open materials
  • Look around what other projects do (in Europe, Brazil, etc.) not to reinvent the wheel.
  • Promote the use of the European portal and involve in global initiatives.

AGREEMENT

A deep technical dialogue must be started among the portal technology developers (MAOR, ARIADNE), the national repository owners (SWITCHCollection, Campus do Mar, Kaunas University, etc.) and the university people representing the end-user community. The discussion should include topics as follows:

  • Metadata schema for aggregation, mapping, translation, etc.
  • Potential functional integration of ARIADNE (as an aggregator) and MAOR (as a portal)
  • Tools, protocols, procedures, implementation options.

ACTION 2 on Peter Szegedi (TERENA) to Doodle for a technical meeting as soon as possible.

 

3) Mini-survey about metadata (The metadata issue)

Concerns have been shared by the attendees about the finding of good quality metadata, the willingness of content owners to improve metadata, and about the aggregation of metadata in an easy way.

AGREEMENT

University people participating in TF-Media must be our anchors in the community to figure out what's going on in this field at the national/institutional levels. What kind of metadta is generated, how that existing metadata can be exposed, what tools are there for aggregation/harvesting, etc.

ACTION 3 on Giannis Stoitsis (GRNET) to draft some questions for the mini-survey and circulate them on the mailing list. After agreement, the final set of questions can be sent to the national/institutional repository owners as well as to the academic community for gathering answers.

Anchor
4th meeting
4th meeting
4th Technical VC preparation (16 November 2012)

List of Participants:
Giannis, Kostas (GRNET); Vicente (Uni Vigo); Eli (IUCC); Peter (TERENA)

Recording:

http://emeeting.campusdomar.es/r_public_list/32e7d3cb8dee8f254f462fb57c1bef0a

Notes:

The very first milestone of the pilot project would be to make a web portal available that aggregates the OER information, facilitate content to be shared or reused, and provides a “deep search” functionality, at least. The deadline to achieve this preliminary web portal prototype would be the next coming TERENA Networking Conference in early June 2013.

 Open questions for developing such a portal/system (by Eli):

  1. Which existing web portal platform can be used as the basis of the TERENA OER portal?
  2. Who is going to develop the portal (coders are needed)?
  3. What are the basic design requirements of such a portal?
  4. What metadata schema will be used by the portal?
  5. Who is going to host and operate the portal?
  6. How the web portal will connect to the back-end repository? What protocol (preferably OAI-PMH) will be used?
  7. How the overall system architecture will look like? How the aggregation engine (preferably ARIADNE), back-end repository (metadata only), and the front-end web portal will work together?
  8. What would be the target of the pilot by the TNC2013?

 Some of these points have been addressed during the discussion:

 

 1. The portal development should not start from scratch! There are many examples and open source codes available such as:
Vicente (Uni.Vigo) said that PuMuKit-based web portal is available under an open source GPL license. In the PuMuKit model the harvesting infrastructure is agnostic from the presentation layer. Eli (IUCC) said that the MAOR-based web portal is also available, the code is owned by IUCC – not licensed yet. Giannis (GRNET) also showed some portal implementation and emphasized that ARIADNE is not a portal solution
In principle, we have to use standard (i.e. not custom made) portal components as much as we can. Develop as least new code as possible.
 
2. Giannis (GRNET) introduced Kostas Vogias, who is active in ARIADNE and has developed an e-learning portal. Eli (IUCC) said that he also have the MAOR developer available, if needed.
 
3. Peter Szegedi (TERENA) will come up with a use case description (for TERENA) and the basic requirements (both functionality as well as look and feel) for the portal development. Vicente (Uni. Vigo) can contribute to this from the end-users perspective
 
4. Eli (IUCC) said that the availability of “good” metadata in content repositories is today much better than it was 10 years ago. MAOR follows the LOM standard and handles 16 metadata fields that can further be extended with 20 optional fields http://www.iucc.ac.il/lo/ISRACore27august.htmGRENT has done an analysis of the metadata schemas available. Giannis (GRENT) is working on the mini-survey about metadata to be sent out to the pilot participants and national repository owners. Vicente (Uni.Vigo) commented that metadata translation function would be interesting to be shown off. Eli added that providing solutions for national content repositories is outside the scope of this pilot, we should work with whatever is available. The metadata issue can be worked out on the fly.
 
5. Anyone could host the service, not an issue for the moment!
 
6. There are two major options for connecting the web portal to the metadata repository back-end.
  • In the asynchronous mode the web portal has its own metadata store inside (like MAOR has) and the metadata can be exported-imported between the web portal and the back-end repository.
  • In the synchronous case, the web portal has no memory, and there is an on-line connection between the web portal and the back-end metadata repository. 

The later is preferred.

7. Eli (IUCC) is working on a paper describing the basic design and architectural principles behind the TERENA OER portal pilot project. The architectural components are as follows (by Vicente):

Content repositories || Harvesting engine <=> Metadata repository <=> API <=> Web portal

The reference harvesting engine must be connected to the web portal via standard API. Giannis (GRENT) commented that if the national/institutional content provides OAI-PMH API the metadata can be harvested (good or bad, that’s a different issue).

8. If 7-10 institutional/national repositories can be connected and about 10k (open) records can be collected (using OAI-PMH) by the TNC2013 (6 months from now) that would be a great success!

In summary, we had a very good and productive first discussion however; more detailed discussions are needed to come to the final decision about which web portal platform can actually be used as a basis of the TERENA OER portal.