1. Workshop on Agricultural Education, Methods, Practices &
Technologies
Pollenzo, Bra, Italy, October 25th, 2012
DEVELOPING A NETWORK OF
CONTENT PROVIDERS:
THE CASE OF
ORGANIC.EDUNET
Vassilis Protonotarios Salvador Sanchez-Alonso
Agro-Know Technologies, Greece University of Alcala, Spain

2. NETWORKS OF CONTENT
PROVIDERS

3. NETWORK IS ABOUT AGGREGATION OF
DATA / METADATA
 concerns
viewing merged collections of
metadata records from different sources
 Repositories
 Websites
 Course management platforms
 Other?
 useful:
when access to specific supersets or
subsets of networked collections
 records actually stored at aggregator OR
 queries distributed at virtually aggregated
collections

4. POPULAR APPROACH: HARVESTING
 based
on Open Archives Initiative Protocol
for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
 XML-driven technology
 wrappers for legacy systems often developed
 implementations for various metadata
standards/specs (including DC, IEEE LOM,…)
 metadata mapping is often needed
4

5. HARVESTING LOOKS LIKE THIS
5
Ternier et al., 2010

6. A SCHOOL AGGREGATOR

7. A UNIVERSITY AGGREGATOR

8. A VOCATIONAL TRAINING
AGGREGATOR

9. THE NEED FOR NETWORKS OF
CONTENT PROVIDERS

10. THE ISSUE / CURRENT STATUS
 Majority of searches for educational material
is performed online.
 Content developers develop content directly in
digital format
 Offline material (e.g. stored in CDs or non-
digitized) or locally stored resources cannot be
retrieved online
 Content may be uploaded in a website or a
repository and then published through portals

11. ADVANTAGES OF BEING
NETWORKED

12. GENERAL ADVANTAGES
 Relatedcontent is aggregated and made
available though a single point of access
(usually a portal)
 Aggregated content is exposed to a wider
audience
 Content
retrieval is facilitated by advanced
search options, filters etc. through the
common user interface

13. PROMOTING COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
 Promoting your course descriptions to various
syndication/aggregation sites to allow users
discover them. Examples?
OCW search engine
(http://www.ocwsearch.com)
Moodle Hub concept (http://hub.moodle.org)
13

14. PROMOTING COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

15. INCLUDING RELEVANT CONTENT
 Supporting authors: widgets allowing course
creator/author to enrich his course by finding related
material and resources
 Europeana ingestion widget
(http://wiki.agroknow.gr/agroknow/index.php/Hac
k4Europe_2012)
 Supporting learners: suggest additional courses
and material relevant to what they access
 Eummena’s Moodle Widget
(http://www.eummena.org/index.php/labs)
15

16. EUROPEANA INGESTION WIDGET

17. EUMMENA’S MOODLE WIDGET

18. ACCESS TO MORE END-USER SERVICES
 Web portals to support user communities (e.g.
thematic, geographical, social, cultural)
 Photodentro Greek school collections portal
(http://photodentro.edu.gr)
 VOA3R social platform for agricultural researchers
(http://voa3r.cc.uah.es)
18

19. PHOTODENTRO – VOA3R PORTAL

20. EXAMPLES OF NETWORKS

21. AGRICULTURE NETWORK
INFORMATION CENTER (AGNIC)
 a voluntary alliance of members based on the
concept of “centers of excellence”
 Network stats
 More than 80 information and subject specialists
 Over 60 topics covered comprehensively
 Full-text and web-based resources
 Participation from 5 countries with collaborative
contributions from many more
 Decentralized structure: Various AgNIC portal
instances exist, such as:
 www.msue.msu.edu/portal/default.cfm?pageset_id=260250
 http://lib.colostate.edu/agnic

22. AGNIC PORTALS

24. AGROASIS - NORDIC AGROECOLOGY
UNIVERSITY NETWORK
 a cooperation between individual scientists and
teachers from the agricultural universities in the
Nordic countries
 aims to unite the resources and knowledge of the
different universities and thereby creating an
education in agroecology that can compete with
the very best in the world.
 available at www.agroasis.org

25. AGROASIS WEBSITE AND PORTAL

26. THE ORGANIC.EDUNET NETWORK

27. CONTENT ANALYSIS
 Currently almost 11,000 resources available
through Organic.Edunet
 15 interconnected repositories from 13 countries
 Resources appropriate for school & university
level, as well as vocational training
 Vast majority are web-based resources (websites)
 Content available in 10 languages
 Metadata available in 16 languages; there are
metadata in 8 languages max.

28. ORGANIC.EDUNET – THE
CONTENT

29. ORGANIC.EDUNET – THE PORTAL

30. ORGANIC.EDUNET WEB PORTAL – THE STATS*
*01/01/2010 -15/10/2012
 more than 5,100 registered users
 almost 11,000 available resources
 resources available in 10 languages
 more than 142,000 visits from 192 countries
 446,000 page views
 ≈13,300/month , >440 per day
 more than 116,000 unique visitors
 mostly new visitors / 75% search traffic

31. AN EVOLVING NETWORK
Expansion of network in three phases so far
1. Phase 1: The Organic.Edunet project (2007-2010)
2. Phase 2: The related projects (2009-now)
3. Phase 3: The new collections and affiliated content
providers (2010-now)

32. PHASE 1 – THE ORGANIC.EDUNET
PROJECT PARTNERS
 Eleven (11) interconnected repositories
 Content providers include
 Institutional repositories (e.g. university repositories)
 Schools (e.g. Rural Wings)
 Associations (e.g. Ecologica)
 User communities
 Archives
 Almost 10,000 metadata records provided

33. PHASE 2 – PROJECTS RELATED TO
ORGANIC.EDUNET
 Four new interconnected repositories
 Organic.Balkanet training curriculum (about 100 records)
 CerOrganic training curriculum (about 300 records)
 ProdINRA (about 2,000 records)
 TrAgLOR (Turkish Agricultural Learning Objects
Repository) (about 300 records)
 Material related to vocational training and higher
education
 Multilingual metadata
 Two existing repositories will be enhanced
 The Miksike collection on organic agriculture
 The Spanish repository on organic agriculture

34. PHASE 3 – NEW COLLECTIONS &
AFFILIATED CONTENT PROVIDERS
 6 new collections:
 Digital Green
 OER Africa
 Green OER
 YouTube videos on organic Agriculture
 Slideshare presentations on organic agriculture
 Flickr photos on organic agriculture
 Small collections, based on quality over quantity
 Manual annotation of a small number of records

35. THE NETWORK OF COLLECTIONS

36. CONNECTING TO
ORGANIC.EDUNET

37. CONNECTING TO THE ORGANIC.EDUNET
NETWORK GUIDES
 Information on “How to connect” is available
through a Wiki page:
http://wiki.agroknow.gr/organic_edunet/index.php/
Main_Page

38. CONNECTING TO THE ORGANIC.EDUNET
NETWORK WORKFLOW

39. 3 WAYS TO CONNECT TO ORGANIC.EDUNET
1. Harvesting of metadata
 example: existing and new collections in Confolio
 harvested through an OAI-PMH target
 existence of various sets, that may be harvested
individually
 Metadata records are validated and harvested
1. Ingestion of metadata
 example: content from social sources
 xml files retrieved indirectly from
YouTube/Flickr/Slideshare etc. & ingested in compliant
tools (Confolio, AgLR)
 Metadata records are validated and harvested
1. Creation of metadata
 Example: not organized collections / individuals
 Use of AgLR/Confolio for the creation of metadata records
 Metadata records are validated and harvested

40. 1. HARVESTING OF METADATA
 Usually the easiest way of content
integration
 Exposure of metadata through an OAI-PMH
target
 Validationof OAI-PMH target -> Validation service
 Metadata validation -> Metadata validation service
 Metadata mapping might be required
 Currently manual mapping
 Use of (Agri)Mint is planned

41. 1. HARVESTING OF METADATA:
WORKFLOW
1. A content provider contacts Organic.Edunet
2. The appropriateness of the repository content is
checked against the Organic.Edunet Quality
Criteria
3. Basic information is requested from the content
provider in a registration form
4. The target is checked using the Organic.Edunet
validation service
5. The metadata structure is checked against the
Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP using the
Organic.Edunet metadata validation service
6. Metadata are harvested automatically
7. If mapping is needed, then the metadata
elements are manually mapped.

42. 2. INGESTION OF METADATA
 In cases where harvesting is not an option
 e.g. not supported by the tool, no tool available
 Metadata need to be compatible with
Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP
 Mapping may be required in some cases
 Metadata need to be ingested in a
compatible tool and probably enriched
 Example: The case of YouTube XML files
 Content needs to meet the Organic.Edunet
Quality Criteria

43. 2. INGESTION OF METADATA:
WORKFLOW
1. A content provider contacts Organic.Edunet
2. The appropriateness of the repository content is
checked against the Organic.Edunet Quality
Criteria
3. Basic information is requested from the content
provider in a registration form
4. A sample number of metadata records (e.g. in xml
format) is checked using the Organic.Edunet
metadata validation service
5. Metadata are manually ingested
6. If mapping is needed, then the metadata elements
are manually mapped before ingestion.
7. In case of additional content, new manual ingestion
needs to take place

44. INGESTION VS HARVESTING
 Trying to encourage content providers to
enable/support harvesting of their metadata records.

45. 3. CREATION OF METADATA
 In cases where harvesting/ingestion is not
an option
 e.g. offline collections, not digitized material etc.
 Metadata records created from scratch
 Fully compatible with Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM
AP if a compatible tool is used (AgLR / Confolio)
 Mapping is needed in case of APs other than
Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM.

46. 3. CREATION OF METADATA
WORKFLOW
1. Types of
Content locally stored Non-digitized Content
(e.g. hard disk) content New content
2. Creation of
metadata
Metadata Annotation Tool
3. Validation of
metadata
4. Publication
through
Organic.Edunet
Web portal

47. ORGANIC.EDUNET IEEE LOM AP &
ONTOLOGY

48. THE ORGANIC.EDUNET AP (1/2)
 Based on the IEEE LOM AP, standard for
describing educational resources
 Slightly modified in order to match better the
annotation of agricultural educational resources
 Selectionof metadata elements
 Changes in the status of elements (e.g. mandatory)
 Introduction of required extensions
 Multilingual AP: Currently available in 16
languages, including Arabic, Chinese & Hindi
 Recently updated to a new version, reflecting
the requirements of the Organic.Lingua EU
project

49. THE ORGANIC.EDUNET AP (2/2)
 The new Organic.Edunet AP is available at:
http://wiki.agroknow.gr/organic_lingua/index.php?
title=OE_elements_specifications

50. THE ORGANIC.EDUNET
ONTOLOGY
 A conceptual model useful for classifying
learning materials on the Organic Agriculture
(OA) and Agroecology (AE) domain
 Used in the Organic.Edunet web portal for the
semantic search
 Recently revised in the context of the
Organic.Lingua project

51. ORGANIC.EDUNET-COMPLIANT
TOOLS

52. ORGANIC.EDUNET – THE TOOLS
1. Confolio Repository Tool
 Used by the Organic.Edunet consortium content providers as well as by
some of the new ones
 Folder-based organization of records
 Integrates the previous Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP (v2.0)
 Multilingual user interface – currently available in 17 languages
1. Agricultural Learning Repository (AgLR) Tool
 A tool developed by Agro-Know to support new content providers
 Integrates the latest Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP (v3.0)
 Will integrate the latest Organic.Edunet ontology
 Supports automatic translation of metadata records (Title, Description &
Keywords)
 Collection-based organization of records
 Multilingual user interface – currently available in 6 languages

53. THE ORGANIC.EDUNET
CONFOLIO TOOL

54. THE AGLR TOOL

55. ABOUT THE TOOLS
 All repository tools that can expose metadata
through an OAI-PMH target can be used
 Metadata will be automatically harvested, after they
are mapped to the Organic.Edunet metadata AP
 Repository tools that cannot expose metadata
through an OAI-PMH target can also be used
 Metadata will have to be exported and then ingested
to a repository tool capable of exposing metadata
through OAI-PMH

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