JISC: Middleware for Distributed Cognition

Project Team:

Colin Tatham – technical lead

David Gilks – database programmer

Howard Noble – project manager

Jeff Kahn – VUE project manager

Katherine Ferguson – Cocoon developer

Matthew Dovey – UDDI and SRW consultant

Robert Gilks – Interface developer

Tom Coppeto – VUE developer

University of Oxford – Learning Technology Group

Mapping to ELFLearning Domain Services

Reporting

Resource list

Competency

Activity author

Course validation

Sequencing

Tracking

Assessment

ePortfolio

Marking

Quality assurance

Activity management

Grading

Learning flow

Curriculum

Personal development

Course management

Mapping to ELF

Common Services

Harvesting

Resolver

Logging

Workflow

Mapping

Messaging

Content management

Rating / Annotation

Chat

Person

Calendaring

Alert

AV conferencing

E-mail management

DRM

Identifier

Search

Presence

Authentication

Packaging

Terminology

Federated search

Role

Metadata management

Whiteboard

Context

Scheduling

Metadata service registry

Filing

Service registry

Rules

Authorisation

Archiving

User preferences

Group

Member

Format conversion

Forum

Mapping to domain: repositories

• Distributed/ federated search– Ability to cross search multiple repositories with Z39.50 and SRW

protocols

• Discover– Ability to find the appropriate copy of a resource through OpenURL

mechanism

• Resource list– Ability to store resource metadata (reference) compliant with the IMS RLI

data specification

System interoperability: MDC project in context of repositories domain

Search(MDC Interface ) Distributed

search(JAFER )

Data layer - repositories

Middleware Layer

Learner InterfaceLayer

JSP Z39.50SRW

Dublin CoreLOMOAI

IMS RLI

UML activity diagram

MDC interface: http://jafer2.oucs.ox.ac.uk:8080/MDC/search.jsp

Resource list

Cocoon transforms - PDF

Cocoon transforms - XHTML

Cocoon transforms - XML

XBib: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbiblio/

XBib http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbiblio/

Mind mapping with VUE

Sharing resource lists – store in repositoriestowards the semantic web

• Repositories holding resource lists can be targets for distributed searches

• Repositories storing mind maps can be interrogated to give learners indication of how articles are related

UDDI

Discussion

Framework for optimising recall and precision.

Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA): http://www.caida.org/home/index.xmlTaken from CAIDA Walrus project: http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/

The information landscape

• Search and discover– Open searching vs. finding the appropriate copy based on learner’s subscription profile– Search metadata globally– Discover appropriate services that pertain to the required resource (full text, ability to edit etc)– Distributed search of OAI repositories– Optimising recall and precision:

• Recall illustrates the confidence that a search returns all the information you are interested in • Precision is the confidence that the results of your search are relevant

• Centralised vs. distributed repositories– Bandwidth usage– Searching across heterogeneous metadata– Functions above metadata e.g. annotation, ratings, related resources, – Ownership and authentication

• Additional components:– Caching– De-duplication– Matching algorithms based on search criteria– Parsing to improve metadata presentation

• Social solutions– Interconnected resource lists/ mind maps– Building recommendation into the core of search practice

• Usability– Use language of the learner not database or cataloguing– To search as part of a network of learners not alone

Links:

• Final report (draft): http://users.ox.ac.uk/~howardn/Publish/

• Interface: http://jafer2.oucs.ox.ac.uk:8080/MDC/search.jsp