DEVELOPING A NETWORK OF CONTENT PROVIDERS:

THE CASE OF ORGANIC.EDUNET

Vassilis Protonotarios

Agro-Know Technologies, Greece

Workshop on Agricultural Education, Methods, Practices & Technologies

Pollenzo, Bra, Italy, October 25th, 2012

Salvador Sanchez-Alonso

University of Alcala, Spain

NETWORKS OF CONTENT PROVIDERS

NETWORK IS ABOUT AGGREGATION OF DATA / METADATA

concerns viewing merged collections of metadata records from different sources Repositories Websites Course management platforms Other?

useful: when access to specific supersets or subsets of networked collectionsrecords actually stored at aggregator ORqueries distributed at virtually aggregated

collections

POPULAR APPROACH: HARVESTING

based on Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)

XML-driven technologywrappers for legacy systems often developedimplementations for various metadata

standards/specs (including DC, IEEE LOM,…)metadata mapping is often needed

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HARVESTING LOOKS LIKE THIS

5 Ternier et al., 2010

A SCHOOL AGGREGATOR

A UNIVERSITY AGGREGATOR

A VOCATIONAL TRAINING AGGREGATOR

THE NEED FOR NETWORKS OF CONTENT PROVIDERS

THE ISSUE / CURRENT STATUS

Majority of searches for educational material is performed online.

Content developers develop content directly in digital format

Offline material (e.g. stored in CDs or non-digitized) or locally stored resources cannot be retrieved online

Content may be uploaded in a website or a repository and then published through portals

ADVANTAGES OF BEING NETWORKED

GENERAL ADVANTAGES

Related content is aggregated and made available though a single point of access (usually a portal)

Aggregated content is exposed to a wider audience

Content retrieval is facilitated by advanced search options, filters etc. through the common user interface

PROMOTING COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

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Promoting your course descriptions to various syndication/aggregation sites to allow users discover them. Examples?

OCW search engine (http://www.ocwsearch.com)

Moodle Hub concept (http://hub.moodle.org)

PROMOTING COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

INCLUDING RELEVANT CONTENT

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Supporting authors: widgets allowing course creator/author to enrich his course by finding related material and resources Europeana ingestion widget

(http://wiki.agroknow.gr/agroknow/index.php/Hack4Europe_2012)

Supporting learners: suggest additional courses and material relevant to what they access Eummena’s Moodle Widget

(http://www.eummena.org/index.php/labs)

EUROPEANA INGESTION WIDGET

EUMMENA’S MOODLE WIDGET

ACCESS TO MORE END-USER SERVICES

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Web portals to support user communities (e.g. thematic, geographical, social, cultural)

Photodentro Greek school collections portal (http://photodentro.edu.gr)

VOA3R social platform for agricultural researchers (http://voa3r.cc.uah.es)

PHOTODENTRO – VOA3R PORTAL

EXAMPLES OF NETWORKS

AGRICULTURE NETWORK INFORMATION CENTER (AGNIC)

a voluntary alliance of members based on the concept of “centers of excellence”

Network stats More than 80 information and subject specialists  Over 60 topics covered comprehensively Full-text and web-based resources  Participation from 5 countries with collaborative

contributions from many more Decentralized structure: Various AgNIC portal

instances exist, such as: www.msue.msu.edu/portal/default.cfm?

pageset_id=260250 http://lib.colostate.edu/agnic

AGNIC PORTALS

AGROASIS - NORDIC AGROECOLOGY UNIVERSITY NETWORK

a cooperation between individual scientists and teachers from the agricultural universities in the Nordic countries

aims to unite the resources and knowledge of the different universities and thereby creating an education in agroecology that can compete with the very best in the world.

available at www.agroasis.org

AGROASIS WEBSITE AND PORTAL

THE ORGANIC.EDUNET NETWORK

CONTENT ANALYSIS

Currently almost 11,000 resources available through Organic.Edunet

15 interconnected repositories from 13 countries

Resources appropriate for school & university level, as well as vocational training

Vast majority are web-based resources (websites)

Content available in 10 languages Metadata available in 16 languages; there

are metadata in 8 languages max.

ORGANIC.EDUNET – THE CONTENT

ORGANIC.EDUNET – THE PORTAL

ORGANIC.EDUNET WEB PORTAL – THE STATS*

more than 5,100 registered users almost 11,000 available resources resources available in 10 languages more than 142,000 visits from 192

countries 446,000 page views ≈13,300/month , >440 per day more than 116,000 unique visitors mostly new visitors / 75% search traffic

*01/01/2010 -15/10/2012

AN EVOLVING NETWORK

Expansion of network in three phases so far

1.Phase 1: The Organic.Edunet project (2007-2010)

2.Phase 2: The related projects (2009-now)

3.Phase 3: The new collections and affiliated content providers (2010-now)

PHASE 1 – THE ORGANIC.EDUNET PROJECT PARTNERS

Eleven (11) interconnected repositories Content providers include

Institutional repositories (e.g. university repositories)

Schools (e.g. Rural Wings) Associations (e.g. Ecologica) User communities Archives

Almost 10,000 metadata records provided

PHASE 2 – PROJECTS RELATED TO ORGANIC.EDUNET

Four new interconnected repositories Organic.Balkanet training curriculum (about 100

records) CerOrganic training curriculum (about 300 records) ProdINRA (about 2,000 records) TrAgLOR (Turkish Agricultural Learning Objects

Repository) (about 300 records)

Material related to vocational training and higher education

Multilingual metadata Two existing repositories will be enhanced

The Miksike collection on organic agriculture The Spanish repository on organic agriculture

PHASE 3 – NEW COLLECTIONS & AFFILIATED CONTENT PROVIDERS

6 new collections: Digital Green OER Africa Green OER YouTube videos on organic Agriculture Slideshare presentations on organic agriculture Flickr photos on organic agriculture

Small collections, based on quality over quantity Manual annotation of a small number of records

THE NETWORK OF COLLECTIONS

CONNECTING TO ORGANIC.EDUNET

CONNECTING TO THE ORGANIC.EDUNET NETWORK GUIDES

Information on “How to connect” is available through a Wiki page:

http://wiki.agroknow.gr/organic_edunet/index.php/Main_Page

CONNECTING TO THE ORGANIC.EDUNET NETWORK WORKFLOW

3 WAYS TO CONNECT TO ORGANIC.EDUNET1. Harvesting of metadata

example: existing and new collections in Confolio harvested through an OAI-PMH target existence of various sets, that may be harvested

individually Metadata records are validated and harvested

2. Ingestion of metadata example: content from social sources xml files retrieved indirectly from

YouTube/Flickr/Slideshare etc. & ingested in compliant tools (Confolio, AgLR)

Metadata records are validated and harvested

3. Creation of metadata Example: not organized collections / individuals Use of AgLR/Confolio for the creation of metadata

records Metadata records are validated and harvested

1. HARVESTING OF METADATA

Usually the easiest way of content integration

Exposure of metadata through an OAI-PMH target Validation of OAI-PMH target -> Validation

service Metadata validation -> Metadata validation

service

Metadata mapping might be required Currently manual mapping Use of (Agri)Mint is planned

1. HARVESTING OF METADATA:

WORKFLOW

1. A content provider contacts Organic.Edunet2. The appropriateness of the repository content

is checked against the Organic.Edunet Quality Criteria

3. Basic information is requested from the content provider in a registration form

4. The target is checked using the Organic.Edunet validation service

5. The metadata structure is checked against the Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP using the Organic.Edunet metadata validation service

6. Metadata are harvested automatically7. If mapping is needed, then the metadata

elements are manually mapped.

2. INGESTION OF METADATA

In cases where harvesting is not an option e.g. not supported by the tool, no tool available

Metadata need to be compatible with Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP Mapping may be required in some cases

Metadata need to be ingested in a compatible tool and probably enriched Example: The case of YouTube XML files

Content needs to meet the Organic.Edunet Quality Criteria

2. INGESTION OF METADATA: WORKFLOW

1. A content provider contacts Organic.Edunet2. The appropriateness of the repository content is

checked against the Organic.Edunet Quality Criteria

3. Basic information is requested from the content provider in a registration form

4. A sample number of metadata records (e.g. in xml format) is checked using the Organic.Edunet metadata validation service

5. Metadata are manually ingested6. If mapping is needed, then the metadata

elements are manually mapped before ingestion.

7. In case of additional content, new manual ingestion needs to take place

INGESTION VS HARVESTING

Trying to encourage content providers to enable/support harvesting of their metadata records.

3. CREATION OF METADATA

In cases where harvesting/ingestion is not an option e.g. offline collections, not digitized material etc.

Metadata records created from scratch Fully compatible with Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM

AP if a compatible tool is used (AgLR / Confolio) Mapping is needed in case of APs other than

Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM.

3. CREATION OF METADATA WORKFLOW

Non-digitized content

New contentContent locally

stored (e.g. hard disk)

Metadata Annotation Tool

1. Types of Content

2. Creation of metadata

3. Validation of metadata

4. Publication through

Organic.Edunet Web portal

ORGANIC.EDUNET IEEE LOM AP & ONTOLOGY

THE ORGANIC.EDUNET AP (1/2)

Based on the IEEE LOM AP, standard for describing educational resources

Slightly modified in order to match better the annotation of agricultural educational resources Selection of metadata elements Changes in the status of elements (e.g. mandatory) Introduction of required extensions

Multilingual AP: Currently available in 16 languages, including Arabic, Chinese & Hindi

Recently updated to a new version, reflecting the requirements of the Organic.Lingua EU project

THE ORGANIC.EDUNET AP (2/2)

The new Organic.Edunet AP is available at:http://wiki.agroknow.gr/organic_lingua/index.php?

title=OE_elements_specifications

THE ORGANIC.EDUNET ONTOLOGY

A conceptual model useful for classifying learning materials on the Organic Agriculture (OA) and Agroecology (AE) domain

Used in the Organic.Edunet web portal for the semantic search

Recently revised in the context of the Organic.Lingua project

ORGANIC.EDUNET-COMPLIANT TOOLS

1. Confolio Repository Tool Used by the Organic.Edunet consortium content providers as well

as by some of the new ones Folder-based organization of records Integrates the previous Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP (v2.0) Multilingual user interface – currently available in 17 languages

2. Agricultural Learning Repository (AgLR) Tool A tool developed by Agro-Know to support new content providers Integrates the latest Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP (v3.0) Will integrate the latest Organic.Edunet ontology Supports automatic translation of metadata records (Title,

Description & Keywords) Collection-based organization of records Multilingual user interface – currently available in 6 languages

ORGANIC.EDUNET – THE TOOLS

THE ORGANIC.EDUNET CONFOLIO TOOL

THE AGLR TOOL

ABOUT THE TOOLS

All repository tools that can expose metadata through an OAI-PMH target can be used Metadata will be automatically harvested, after

they are mapped to the Organic.Edunet metadata AP

Repository tools that cannot expose metadata through an OAI-PMH target can also be used Metadata will have to be exported and then

ingested to a repository tool capable of exposing metadata through OAI-PMH

Thank you for your

attentio

n!