Search and discovery technology for OER

[Nathan Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org>]

Hello,

I just wanted to follow up on my previous email
[https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/oer-discovery/2010-May/000000.html]
announcing the DiscoverEd sprint at Michigan State University with a
brief report on the outcomes.  You can find an overview of information
about the sprint outcomes at
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscoverEd_Sprint_%28June,_2010%29#Outcomes.

Ten developers gathered at MSU over the past three days to learn about
the DiscoverEd code and work on new features that will make the
software more flexible for users and publishers.

In addition to time spent doing a detailed walk through of building
the code and running the software, we focused on the following areas
of development:

* Plugins for retrieving metadata from additional sources.  Currently
DiscoverEd discovered metadata from feeds, OAI-PMH, and RDFa.  This
allows people running instances of DiscoverEd to supplement that
through a plugin that retrieves metadata from databases, web services,
etc, and indexes it with the resource.  This work was completed during
the sprint.
* Mapping metadata fields to simple, "human" query syntax.  DiscoverEd
uses RDF to model metadata, meaning fields have identifiers that look
like web addresses.  Work was begun to allow site operators to specify
short, human readable labels for these identifiers.  This will allow
DiscoverEd sites to easily expose arbitrary metadata fields to users
for searching, without writing additional code.
* Enabling users to add or correct metadata about results.
Communities may wish to allow their users to supplement or correct
metadata about results.  Work was begun on enabling this through the
DiscoverEd metadata store.
* Improved RDFa and provenance support.  Building on work previously
begun by Asheesh Laroia and Raphael Krut-Landau at Creative Commons,
we integrated an improved RDFa parser in the source tree, and merged
support for provenance in the metadata store.  This lays the
foundation for limiting DiscoverEd searches to metadata provided by
specific curators.

You can also find more detailed blog posts about the work we
accomplished at http://labs.creativecommons.org/.  We've also been
building out the documentation on DiscoverEd in the Creative Commons
wiki.  See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/DiscoverEd for an overview.

Please let me know if you'd like more details about any of the areas
we worked on, or about DiscoverEd generally.

Regards,

Nathan

----
Nathan R. Yergler
Chief Technology Officer
Creative Commons

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Nathan_Yergler