Item Banks and the JISC Information Environment

Item banks and the JISC Information Environment CETIS Metadata and Repositories SIG, Glasgow

Contents
an overview of the JISC Information Environment
the JISC IE technical standards
an overview of Item Banks
what is an item?
what is an item bank?
bringing it all together

… the JISC Information Environment…

The JISC Information Environment is…
an enabling architecture or framework
geared towards delivery of more seamless interoperability between ‘resource discovery’ services in UK HE and FE
primarily intended to allow end-users to discover , access , use and publish resources
heterogeneous – i.e. the JISC IE does not specify what a ‘resource’ is
bibliographic resources, images, videos, map data, research data, datasets, sounds, etc., etc.
digital and physical

The JISC Information Environment…
encourages ‘content providers’ to offer machine interfaces (services) that
expose metadata for harvesting
expose metadata and/or full-text for searching
expose resources at persistent URIs
expose news-feeds
expose context-sensitive links to resources when appropriate
enables everyone else to
build user-centric and machine-centric applications on top of those machine interfaces

JISC IE technical standards
encourages ‘content providers’ to offer machine interfaces (services) that
expose metadata for harvesting
expose metadata and/or full-text for searching
expose resources at persistent URIs
expose news-feeds
expose context-sensitive links to resources when appropriate
… use Shibboleth for authentication and access control and register interface details with the IESR OAI-PMH SRU HTTP and cool URIs RSS 1.0 OpenURL

In a nutshell… the JISC IE
shares some similarities with what has now come to be known as Web 2.0…
... though it also has significant differences
encouraged openness but didn’t engender participation
too rigid in use of unRESTful standards?
do we ‘trust our users’ and their ‘right to remix’?
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

JISC IE Architecture JISC-funded content providers institutional content providers external content providers brokers aggregators catalogues indexes institutional portals subject portals learning management systems media-specific portals end-user desktop/browser presentation fusion provision OpenURL link servers shared infrastructure identity providers (IdP) institutional profiling services terminology services service registries identifier services metadata schema registries © Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation, 2006 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Athens federation services (e.g. WAYF) Content providers are services that make content available… e.g. repositories (of anything, including QTI items) Presentation layer applications now typically delivered thru the browser using Ajax, JSON, etc.

The OAI-PMH in more detail
OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
simple protocol for sharing metadata records between applications
currently at version 2.0
based on HTTP, XML, XML Schema and XML namespaces
allows a harvester to ask a remote repository for some or all of its metadata records

OAI-PMH (2)
simple DC is default (mandatory) record format
supports any record format provided it can be encoded using XML and XML Schema (e.g. DC, IEEE LOM, MARC, ODRL, …)
neutral about what kind of resource is described by the metadata Open Archives Initiative http:// www.openarchives.org /

… item banks…

What is an item?
a content package (IMS CP)
containing
a QTI XML file
any associated resources such as images, sound clips, etc.
and some metadata (imsmanifest.xml)
Assumption: QTI items are only ever shared in the form of a CP (ItemCP)

What is an item bank?
a repository of ItemCPs
i.e. a database for storing ItemCPs (in packaged or unpackaged form), supporting machine interfaces that allow other applications to
harvest metadata records (OAI-PMH)
search metadata and/or item content (SRU)
obtain copies of the ItemCPs themselves (HTTP and cool URIs)
grab news feeds (RSS)
deposit new or updated ItemCPs (??)

… bringing it all together…

What we need to do – the JISC IE way
first and foremost… assign cool URIs to every ItemCP (and other significant resources) held in the Item Bank
map the imsmanifest.xml metadata to simple Dublin Core - expose a simple DC record for every ItemCP in the Item Bank using the OAI-PMH
dc:identifier should contain the cool URI (above)
optionally, index the metadata and item content and expose search interface using SRU
optionally, expose news feeds using RSS

What we need to do – the Web 2.0 way
first and foremost… assign cool URIs to every ItemCP (and other significant resources) held in the Item Bank
generate a Google sitemap for every ItemCP in the Item Bank
consider browser sniffing/content negotiation to serve an HTML view of every ItemCP to Google and other robots
optionally, index the metadata and item content and expose search interface using A9 OpenSearch
optionally, expose news feeds as RSS or Atom

Questions…
… and discussion

Item Banks and the JISC Information Environment

by Eduserv Foundation on Oct 11, 2006

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Item Banks and the JISC Information Environment — Presentation Transcript