Paper Presentation Abstracts
 
FLOR: Latin American Federation of Learning Object Repositories
Xavier Ochoa, Luis Alvarez, Rafael Morales, Doris Pernalete,
Latin American Community on Learning Objects (LACLO)
 
This paper discusses the current state of Learning Object Repositories in different Latin America countries and the limitationsand opportunities that enabled the creation the Latin American federation, FLOR.  Special attention is given to the role that open standards and open access to content under Creative Commons license had into the bootstrap phase of this federation.  The technical infrastructure of FLOR is presented, together with the challenges that it faces as it grows and also connects with other federations at global level. Finally, plans and ideas for future developments are mentioned.
 
 
Unfinished Business: How Technology Has (Not?) Changed our Relationship(s) to the Humanities
Héctor Vila, Middlebury College
 
Since Martin Heidegger’s lecture, The Question Concerning Technology, 1954, we have struggled to understand our relationship to what Heidegger calls the essence of technology, what the “thing” is.  Meanwhile technology has become ubiquitous: digital media and the tools to create have far outpaced our understanding of our relationship to them.  This is profoundly obvious in the humanities where technology, as Heidegger says, “is human activity.”  Yet the university remains mired in the departmentalization of learning.  The promises of technology—federated resources, online learning—are unrealized because they are in direct competition with the economics of education: the university as another corporation for the transnational exchange of capital.  Thus an internal legitimation struggle is going on concerning the nature of knowledge production and until we organize politically around disputes within disciplines about methods and theories of research, technology will remain a misunderstood—and marginalized—human activity.  And traditional education as yielding the greatest value. Download paper OiW_Vila.pdf
 
 
Facilitating Collaborative Conversation Analysis Research
Max R. Eckardt, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding
 
Currently, Conversations Analysis (CA) is studied on remote sites with different databanks, software, methodologies and standards. A project initiated by ICOR, IBIS and Talkbank.org aims at delivering common means to manage these resources and to maintain adynamic discussion among researchers and students. The goal is to increase knowledge-creation and exchange related to the
study of interaction. The consortium decided to join their resources to create a common research platform. The open platform shall host reference documentation for applied transcription standards, discussion pages, transcription examples and a universal search and file conversion engine. This online, contribution-driven workspace is intended to facilitate discussions, negotiations, and continuous User Driven Innovation of research tools. This paper will examine how users can be em-powered to develop and innovate search and conversion tools to facilitate collaborative CA.
 
 
OSID Interfaces for Transparent Distributed Computing
Justin Riley et al, MIT
 
For the most part, incorporating research level codes into the classroom is inhibited by the difficulty of integrating required computing resources in a manner that enables the development of user-friendly and easily accessible software.  The Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) at MIT addressed this problem by developing the Cluster OSID, a set of vendor-independent Open Source Interface Definitions (OSID) for accessing and managing computing resources proposed for inclusion in the O.K.I. OSID V3 specification. This OSID allows software developers to eliminate vendor-specific code for accessing computing resources from their application's source code. This in turn allows for swapping implementation specific code used to access or manage computing resources without any changes to existing application code. The Cluster OSID helps support faculty in bringing their research tools into the curriculum by allowing the integration of distributed computing resources.  Download paper OiW_Riley.pdf
 
 
Open web services as approach to New Map Composition from Scattered Geo-data Sources
Petr Horak, Wirelessinfo
 
Presentation of web system for integration of geo-spatial data from different external sources and their publication on the web in new map composition forms. The source data stay at source servers and can be updated – in the same time the new compositions are updated as well.
 
 
Project FederID
Clément Oudot, Groupe Linagora
 
La gestion des informations personnelles et professionnelles des collaborateurs est une tâche fastidieuse pour les équipes techniques. Avec FederID, les collaborateurs peuvent désormais agir eux-mêmes sur leurs données, ou déléguer leur gestion. Ces données circulent ensuite dans le système d'information de la société entre toutes les applications membre de la fédération. C'est alors dans ce cas l'utilisateur qui autorise le partage de ses informations. Initié par le biais de l'appel à projet ANR RNRT en 2005, le projet FederID a bénéficié pendant plusieurs années du travail de SS2L, d'industriels et de laboratoires de recherche. Ces acteurs restent impliqués à part entière et garantissent la pérennité du projet.  Download paper OiW_Oudot.pdf
 
 
Transactional Web Services for Fedora
Timothy J. Potter, Luk Vervenne, Xerceo, Synergetics
 
Fedora’s Web Services do not allow a client application to perform two or more operations within the same unit-of-work as all actions are done in an atomic manner. While failover conflicts may be rare in practice for the traditional use of Fedora as a digital repository (librarian writes, the world reads) this non-transactional approach leaves the entire application in an inconsistent state. The risk of inconsistencies in a large-scale deployment of Fedora is not acceptable. Giving the client application the ability to commit or rollback operations as a single unit-of-work avoids this problem. With transactions, we can insure all the participants in a Fedora client application achieve a mutually agreed outcome.
 
 
Open Educational Resources Interoperability Sprint Outcomes: Linking OER Providers
Brandon Muramatsu, Justin Ball, Joel Duffin, David Wiley, Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, Utah State University
 
We asked ourselves, what can we do to jumpstart the interoperability of Open Educational Resources projects like OpenCourseWare? We wanted to move beyond talk to actual implementation—we wanted to provide immediate benefit to the users of OpenCourseWares and related projects. The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University convened a group of dedicated and talented practitioners in open education to link together and integrate their work. Building upon independent services and using the web and standards to link them together, the participants at the Open Educational Resources Interoperability Sprint were able federate resources in simple and straightforward ways. This paper will describe the technologies, services and projects that were developed over a two and half day period to further the interoperability of open educational resources. As an example, the OER Recommender (a simple content recommender service containing learning objects and opencourseware courses) was integrated with at the Open University's OpenLearn project, as well as with Connexions. Similarly, search functionality provided by OCW Finder and OER Commons were integrated at the OpenCourseWare Consortium portal and ccLearn respectively.  Download paper OiW_Muramatsu.pdf
 
 
How Open Educational Standards Underlie a Blackboard Building Block for Federated Repository Search and Access to the Blackboard Content System
Jeffrey Kahn, Verbena Consulting; George Kroner, Blackboard Developer Network
 
There is a wealth of content stored in repositories which would benefit educators and learners alike. Unfortunately this content is rarely easily discoverable, let alone useable in a CMS or other instructive or constructive environment. Additionally in the case of Blackboard content added to courses or organizations effectively 'disappears' once the course is no longer used unless the contributor can remember the exact course the content was used in or the filename of the content in question.  The Federated Repository Search Tool intends to solve many issues with the discovery and (re)use of content for users of the Blackboard CMS. It will do so by enabling users with a tool, which allows the searching of not only their course-contributed content, but also external repositories. Discovered content may be reused, added as "new" content in courses and organizations, linked to from other web sites, or if permitted by the repository, downloaded and used in research papers and other documents.  Download paper OiW_Kahn.pdf
 
 
Le cadre réglementaire: défis de la qualité du e-enseignement
Fatima  Roumate, Université Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech, Maroc
 
The technological future of nations depends, among other factors, on the quality of e-learning, which implies setting up favorable laws and regulations. Download paper OiW_Roumate.pdf
 
 
A Portable Common Cartridge Tool
Mark Norton, Nolaria Consulting
 
The IMS Common Cartridge specification describes an interchange format for content.  This presentation shows how OKI OSIDs can be leveraged to create a common cartridge installation tool that can be used on multiple platforms.
 
Data interchange standards have been the basis for interoperability for many years.  Recently, it has been noted that standard data formats don't address all of the issues.  We present a Sakai tool based on the OKI OSIDs v3.0 that could work in other web application frameworks.  The presentation will touch briefly on new features of the 3.0 OSIDs and explore advantages of the OSID approach.  Download paper OiW_Norton.pdf
 
 
Le patrimoine numérique des établissements universitaires: une richesse à valoriser et à partager avec le système ORI-OAI, ouvert et interopérable
Monique Joly et Nolwen Huet, INSA Lyon
 
Le projet ORI-OAI vise la création d’un système ouvert, libre et gratuit pour gérer l’archive numérique des établissements universitaires. Ce système permet:
 
  1. • L’archivage des ressources numériques,
  2. • Leur valorisation optimale par une indexation scientifique,
  3. • Leur partage avec d’autres institutions universitaires,
  4. • L’accès aux ressources, ouvert ou contrôlé, dans le respect du
      droit d’auteur.
 
Ce système s’adapte aux procédures de travail, répondant ainsi, à la diversité des organisations universitaires ; il s’intègre au système d’information global de l’établissement et assure la pérennité des archives numériques institutionnelles, sur le long terme.  Download paper OiW_Joly-Huet.pdf
 
An Open Content Marketplace: A Migration Tool for All the Content Systems Across the University
 David Flanders, University of London
 
As more and more content systems emerge across colleges in Universities (e.g. LMS, VLE, VRE, CMS, REPO, LibCat, etc) the need to manage this content across divergent systems has become critical.  The University of London is no stranger to this with twenty separate colleges and hundreds of content systems between them all.  Through JISC project funding The Bloomsbury Colleges consortium has developed a migration tool to help facilitate the bulk management of this content.  The prototype of this tool is now in alpha release and looking for further input by other institutions.  While initial focus has been upon intra-university systems the possibility of moving institutional content to anywhere on the web (Flickr, YouTube, iTunes) has opened up the idea and possibility that content should be as easy to move from one system to another as it is to move a physical object from one shelf to another.  The project has looked at various layers for interoperability including the OKI OSID repository spec and continues to enable more systems to plug into the migration tool.  Download paper OiW_Flanders.pdf
 
 
 
Showcase Demonstrations
 
Conversation analysis research platform implementing User Driven Innovation
IBIS (Univ. Southern Denmark), Talkbank.org (Carnegie Mellon Univ.), ICAR (Univ. Lumière Lyon 2)
 
Currently, Conversations Analysis (CA) is studied on remote sites with different databanks, software, methodologies and standards. This project aims at delivering common means to manage these resources and to maintain a dynamic discussion among researchers and students. The goal is to increase knowledge-creation and exchange related to the study of interaction. The project consortium decided to join their resources to create a common research platform. The open platform shall host reference documentation for applied transcription standards, discussion pages, transcription examples and a universal search and file conversion engine. This online, contribution-driven workspace is intended to facilitate discussions, negotiations, and continuous User Driven Innovation of research tools.
 
 
The Campus Project: e-learning tools and platforms integration
Francesc Santanach Delisau, Open University Catalonia
 
Today there is a whole series of e-learning platforms available in both the open source and proprietary software fields. However, choosing the right option in every situation raises many doubts, since many factors are involved in. This showcase proposal will focus on the use of standards to facilitate e-learning tools and platforms integration. The Campus Project, promoted by the Secretariat for Telecommunications and the Information Society (STSI) of the Regional Government of Catalonia, grew out of the agreement signed by the majority of Catalan universities in order to have an open source virtual campus, which make it possible for them to provide higher education, both online and semi face-to-face.This initiative came out of the university system open to the world, aiming to become an international benchmark for e-learning.  Download paper OiW_Santanach.pdf
 
 
Outside-In: Application interoperability using an OSID-based framework
Adam Franco, Middlebury College
 
Segue and Concerto are two curricular applications built upon Harmoni, an OSID-based service- oriented application framework. This demonstration will show how web-site content created in Segue is stored as OSID Assets in Harmoni’s OSID Repository. Similarly, the demonstration will show how multimedia assets created in Concerto can be stored in the same repository. Interoperability will be demonstrated as each application is used to view and make real-time modifications to the OSID Assets created using the other application, while at the same time respecting the authorizations given to those assets. Additionally, an OSID Repository to OAI- PMH gateway will be shown providing the LibraryFind meta-search tool with access to the metadata for content created in Segue, Concerto, and a lightweight read-only OSID Repository. Download Paper OiW_Franco.pdf
 
 
Interoperating learn eXact LCMS, Harvest Road Hive and Sakai CLE and Moodle VLEs using OKI’s OSIDs in New Generation Digital Content Marketplaces
Alession Artuffo, Giunti Labs
 
This demonstration focuses on a new generation 3-tier model strategy for empowering the digital marketplace. The solution presented is comprised of a back-end content production infrastructure, a middle tier trusted and federated content broker and harvester and a front-end set of interoperable VLEs, Moodle and Sakai CLE.
 
 
Discovering, Acquiring and Using Content from a Federation of Repositories Including Open, Library, and Commercial Business Models
Jeffrey Kahn, Verbena Consulting
 
The demonstrator will show the discovery of repository connectors using a live registry; will show selection among resources for inclusion in simple and advanced searches; will show results in several end-user tools (including view of metadata; will show resources from multiple repositories used to create artifacts.)  The applications and repositories being demonstrated include those being developed for the Cal State University Digital Marketplace, the Birkbeck College Data Migration project, Tufts Visual Understanding Environment and Pachyderm.
 
Persee
 
Persée is a French public-funded program for the digitization and online publishing of printed academic journals in the fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also able to process digital documents. Launched by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, this program is managed and implemented by Lumière University Lyon 2.  Persée has been developed according to an open source model (JAVA, OAI-PMH) in compliance with the standards widely used by digital libraries across the world (METS, DC, MODS, MADS, TEI) and most recently  the Repository OSID of the Open Knowledge Initiative.
 
 
OpeniWorld:Europe2008
Federating Resources Through Open Interoperability