OERca2 planning

OERca2 planning

OERca2 Current Design Documents
General Interface Concept

Interaction Scenarios

OERca2 User Actions/Functionality

Functionality Questions - from the August 28 meeting

Version 2 proposal and requirements
OERca Version 2 User Interface and Technical Proposals

Proposed Version 2 Functionality - December 2008

OERca v1 Functionality (current and proposed - this is somewhat outdated Pieter 18:29, 12 December 2008 (UTC))

Usability testing and planning
User Scenarios - who might need software support and what support they might need

October 17 through November 17- Survey/Questionnaire and interview protocol development


 * An online survey will be developed and sent to all OERca users. The goal of the survey will be to obtain general OERca feedback that could be useful in Version 2 development, but also to obtain data related to content organization and personal information management which will be necessary for applying the "bin" metaphor to version 2.


 * Interview questions and tasks geared at understanding content management in the dScribe context will be developed.

November 17 through December 1- Survey with dScribes and other users


 * Data from the survey will be collected and interpreted
 * Survey Reults


 * Interviews/testing with dScribes will be scheduled

December 1-15- Interviews/card sorting/ talk aloud observations with dScribes


 * The interviews and testing will take place, as a report of the findings is prepared and presented for application to version 2 development

Framework Comparisons
Some of the reasoning why the people at COSL (eduCommons) used Plone/Zope/Python instead of MySQL/PHP. 

TurboGears framework

Javascript Libraries
Comparison of common Javascript libraries

CO Architecture
Flickr Architecture Document

Items to research

 * OpenOffice.org api http://api.openoffice.org/
 * Detecting embedded content e.g. images, videos, sound (Content Objects) and noting the page number, size, location of CO on page. Attempting to extract line-art on top of images along with the image would be great.
 * Creating context images from Powerpoint/OpenOffice Impress.
 * Working with PDF edit plugin http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport to see if we can import and edit PDFs this way.
 * Extracting text from files and integrating with indexing service.


 * Doc decomp optimization and refinement
 * Decomp multiple docs in parallel.
 * Investigate filters for other document types.
 * Add text extraction.


 * Web Service frameworks. Wrap the current doc-decomp with some sort of web framework so decomp jobs can be dispatched to the service and done asynchronously. Ideally the framework generated should be RESTful. A list of frameworks is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Web_service_Frameworks


 * Document text indexing. Linked to and possibly dependent on decomp.
 * Once text is extracted, figure out how to index it.
 * Make index usable through eduCommons, OERca, OERca2
 * http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
 * Projects using Lucene that may also be useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucene
 * Investigate other appropriate indexing engines. Evaluate them.


 * Look at imgSeek http://www.imgseek.net/ to see if we can index images in the uploads with it. The server side component of it is at http://server.imgseek.net/ and examples of use are given at http://server.imgseek.net/category/documentation/examples/ . This may be a great enhancement that combines with the above.


 * Crawling sites for import to OERca.
 * COs present in sites.
 * Textual content.
 * Interpet Javascript and follow there.
 * Investigate dynamic pages.


 * Content packaging formats.
 * IMS Content Package. Particularly see how to bridge OERca/OERca2 and eduCommons.
 * IMS Common Cartridge.


 * Make Plone product from Kathleen/Piet's eduCommons UI work so it can be easily installed instead of having to import and edit numerous files.