Yinlin Chen, Edward A. FoxDept. of CS, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA

Contact info: fox@vt.edu

Ensemble Project Meeting, May 18-19, 2009, Portland, OR

NSF grant numbers DUE-0840713, 0840719, 0840721, 0840668, 0840597, and 0840715

Collaborators working on Ensemble, NSDL, SI, CITIDEL, and other related projects

VT students, faculty, staff helping on this and precursor projects◦ AlgoViz: C. Shaffer, M. Akbar, A. Alon◦ WebCat: S. Edwards, R. Parthasarathy ◦ CS6604 project Fall 2008: W. Zhu, A. Singh, S.

Santhanam ◦ CS4624 project Spring 2009: P. Frangipane

An integrated DL (see 5S-related dissertation of Rao Shen, building upon Goncalves diss.)

Includes union collection made up of contributing collections + new content sources

Includes union community made up of contributing communities +new social groups

Includes a union social network built by enhancing the social networks from each contributing community and collection

Includes union services enhancing the union of the respective services + other services

Yinlin Chen Dissertation – please help!Lots of good papers and results likely from this!

4

Repository1

DL1

Repository2

Union Catalog

Union Repository

Catalog1 Catalog2

Searching

Union DL DL2

archaeologists

Society

General Public

Society

ArchaeologistsGeneral Public

Union Society

ServiceBrowsingService

Union Service

Harvesting, Mapping,Searching, Browsing,

Clustering, Visualization

Architecture of the ETANA Union DL(for archaeology)

5

Repository1

DL1

Repository2

Union Catalog

Union Repository

Catalog1 Catalog2

Searching

Union DL DL2

Students, Professor Researcher

Society

General Public

Society

ComputingGeneral Public

Union Society

ServiceBrowsingService

Union Service

Harvesting, Mapping,Searching, Browsing,

Recommending, Logging

Architecture of an Ensemble Union DL

(for computing education)

National Science Digital Library -> Distributed Learning Help with Science, Technology, Engineering

and Mathematics (STEM) learning One of the Pathways projects in NSDL Serve the computing community(ies) Connect computing with other STEM

disciplines (and their Pathways) Harmonize with the central support groups

that serve all of NSDL

NSDL central services use Fedora for repository Fedora and DSpace are working together in a

variety of ways toward aiding DL community Fedora works with OAI-PMH, Web services, and

various interfaces including◦ Fez◦ Drupal

We will connect Fedora with Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, etc. so they can provide users with tailored and personalized user environments

A distributed portal A site that harvests computing educational

resources and serves as data provider to NSDL A repository providing a range of services,

including to users and to partner sites A bridge linking together all interested

computing education communities A web site that allows users to discover,

download, review, evaluate, use, adapt, and submit computing educational resources

Make sure that all computing related resources get to NSDL.org, with good metadata, so are easily discoverable

Help with the deployment of tools and services developed in NSDL so the computing community benefits from DL best practices

Test, evaluate, and as appropriate, contribute our advanced tools and services, and other best practices, to help the rest of NSDL

Help with NSDL evaluation and improvement

Provide better integration◦ Improved user experience◦ Improved services

Build further upon Fedora so it can support a union DL, with ◦ additional services, and ◦ handling additional content and information

Deploy automated methods so always have a complete and up-to-date metadata repository of good computing educational resources

Build a social network of all in computing who contribute resources, as well as others who identify as reviewers and/or users of resources

Have an exemplary DL with full range of services that are most valuable to our users

Help each computing community to best serve all educational needs of its constituents

Ss Examples ObjectivesStreams Text; Video; Audio; Image; Bit Properties of Ensemble DL

content

Structures Collection; Ontologies; Catalog; Metadata; Hypertext; Document

Organizational aspects of the Ensemble DL content

Spaces User environment; Application environment; Server environment; DL content environment

Ensemble Portal logical and presentation views.

Scenarios Searching; Browsing; Recommending; Marking; Annotating; Logging; Submitting; Harvesting; Data providing

Users’ behaviors while using Ensemble Portal services. Services’ functions behaviors.

Societies User, groups, communities, social networks

Ensemble project teams, responsible for running Ensemble services; actors, that use those services and relationships among them.

Digital Object

CommunityCollection

Ensemble DL

Metadata Catalog

Structural Metadata

Specification

Streams Structures Spaces Scenarios Societies

Browsing

Searching

servicesStructured Stream

UIModules

Web UI

Indexing

Notification

SubmissionWorkflow

Document

Descriptive Metadata

Specification

Authorizations

Users

RegisterUser

AdminUser

Groups

Plus others: harvesting, data/service providing, …

Help each collection with content that is appropriate but comes from elsewhere

Help each community with useful services Through harvesting, ontology, articulation,

and data providing - serve as a bridge, between all the computing communities and collections

Have central site to show best practices and all content and services, so communities can learn from each other

Scope: ◦ Related to Computing Education

OAI Data Provider: ◦ Collection providers need to set up OAI data providing

services to allow the Ensemble portal to access their metadata. Harvesting can be done on a periodic basis.

Metadata Requirement: ◦ Dublin Core◦ Required: title, description, subject, source, creator,

date, format, rights and coverage Resource Requirement:

◦ up-to-date, continue growing, access to content directly

Collections

AlgoViz

Syllabus

CSTC

CSTA - K12

Computer Science Virtual History Museum

Alice

PlanetMath

AJAX

Gaming and Graphics

Hibernate

Java Programming

Other Related Links

SIGCSE presentation

Tutorials

Directly Harvest

Hosted by CITIDEL

Collected by CITIDEL

Scope: ◦ Related to Computing Education

OpenID Support: ◦ Allows users to use their own OpenID to sign onto

Ensemble portal site and participated sites Logging of user actions:

◦ Storing the user activity log will help us analyze user behavior and provide more user oriented services

Access to related content submitted elsewhere◦ Ensemble will gather contents from a wide range of

providers; users will have access to diverse materials that are present in different sites.

Access to info on people not (yet) in your community◦ Ensemble will let users view content provided by

persons who are not listed in the users’ community. ◦ The union social network will be directly and

indirectly accessible.

Provide a ‘single system’ feel to its users Present collected content in a unified form Use ontology and multiple classification

systems to provide various views The distributed nature of the content along

with various options for marking, reviewing it will provide the user with better understanding and control over the information.

eZine:◦ Publish e-magazines, for each community / altogether

Expert Voice:◦ Users can create blogs or comment on existing blogs. It is

created to facilitate short conversations among those in the STEM community.

Fez:◦ A content and communication management system that can be

used by authors, editors, reviewers, and users of different communities to manipulate and distribute contents.

◦ This tool provides a better searching scheme for Fedora, has support for controlled vocabularies and better security options.

Harvest Manager:◦ This tools allows automatic harvesting of OAI-PMH metadata

from various sources. ITuneU:

◦ Supports mobile learning with computing educational materials

Each computing community can announce activities related to computing education.

Users can share news of their activities related to computing education: new resources, resource reuse, adaptations.

Ensemble Twitter: http://twitter.com/EnsemblePathway

Ensemble Twitter pound sign: #ensemblepw◦ Please start now with notes of this meeting!

Follow topics related to computing education in real-time with searches (RSS of tweets)

Facebook group – please join & contribute◦ Computing Ensemble

Facebook application – planned so will have an environment in Facebook for those who there want to work with Ensemble

Encourage posting of suitable content to Facebook

Ensemble in Facebook – become a fan: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=88238571212&ref=nf

Synchronize status with Twitter

Site for public◦ Featured collections◦ Browsing collections◦ Searching collections◦ News/About/Contact◦ Content providers/ Collaborators◦ Forum

Site for project team◦ Forums for individual project team discussion◦ Mailing list for whole project team◦ Collection management (Controlled vocabularies,

workflow, search keys, collections view) ◦ Collection access statistics

Home

ForumsCollections Searching

Blogs

RSS

News Communities

Twitter

Mailinglist

GeneralUser

ProjectTeams

DLs Participated Sites

Facebook

Twitter

Second Life

User Contributes

. . .

Browsing

OtherModules

Extends Fedora to support mark submission, browsing, and searching, along with full support for mark metadata.

Represents marks as first-class objects in Fedora. Through a 'mark-aware' tool, a user opens the

documents to view, creates a new mark by selecting a sub-document, highlights the selected sub-document, and is prompted for commentary.

To Do:◦ Connect in mark-aware tools◦ Demonstrate marks on popular content

Evaluate usability in Central Portal Site Add XML-based DL logging everywhere

◦ Generic - based on 5S◦ Transaction – basic unifying entity

5Squal (extended?) to evaluate Ensemble DL at all levels and covering all aspects

A quality assessment tool for Digital Libraries

Refine and evaluate Ensemble DL

Digital Objects

Metadata

Services

• Completeness

• Conformance

• Accessibility• Similarity

• Significanc

e

• Timeliness

• Efficienc

y

• Reliabilit

y

Numeric

Indicators

Home page

Test and improve user interface of Drupal site

Make sure each team and partner is visible in some way through Drupal site

Add more content to central collection◦ AlgoViz◦ WebCat◦ <whoever asks next … >

Integrate the ontology so it can be used for browsing

Improve architecture, with use cases, … Help connect with clouds, grids, service

oriented architecture, Fedora disseminations, …

Help adding other communities besides AlgoViz and WebCat

Help adding other collections Help adding services Help with testing Specific efforts on: ontology, articulation, SI,

social network, rewards, dissemination/ publicity

Get login for Drupal site and send comments Join groups in Facebook, Second Life Follow Ensemble Twitter Provide suggestions, requirement statements Each tool, service: explore how to integrate

with central site and with other sites Each community: provide user info Each collection: provide info on: users, logs Each team: setup your pages in Drupal site

(for public and for team use)