Roger Zender's Blog: NMC Conference Day 4

NMC Conference Day 4

(No Day 3 of the conference for me)
I can't say that I've ever been motivated enough to attend a conference session at 8:30 am on a Saturday morning (unless I was giving it). But this session sounded extremely interesting and relevant.

The New Content Marketplace
This session will highlight and demonstrate the state of the art of content integration utilizing Service Oriented Architecture. The functionality of various end-user applications and their ability to discover and make use of content from a diverse collection of sources will be covered. Technologies and content repository integration to be demonstrated will include Tufts’ Visual Understanding Environment, SearchParty (from MacLearningEnvironments), Sakai Twin Peaks, Harvest Road Hive, MIT’s Visualizing Cultures Database, Fedora, Dspace and Pachyderm.

Jeff Merriman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
Joshua Archer, California State University, CDL;
Peter Wilkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This session was exciting because it addresses an emerging problem, many tools are being created to build, house, and disseminate digitized information while very little is being done to allow these tools to talk with one another. This is limiting access in a realm where there should be very few limits.

This session and these concepts rely heavily on understanding programming technology, and since software programming is not my forte, I will do my best to synthesize and "copy and paste" the necessary pieces to paint the correct picture this session tried to present.

The Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I) develops and promotes specifications that describe how the components of a software environment communicate with each other and with other enterprise systems. O.K.I. specifications enable sustainable interoperability and integration by defining standards for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Through this work O.K.I. seeks to open new market opportunities across a wide range of software application domains.

To this end, O.K.I. has developed and published the Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), whose design has been informed by a broad architectural view. The OSIDs define important components of a SOA as they provide general software contracts between service consumers and service providers. This enables applications to be constructed independently of any particular service environment, and eases integration. The OSIDs enable choice of end-user tools by providing plugin interoperability.

OSIDs are software contracts only and therefore are compatible with most other technologies and specifications, such a SOAP, WSDL. They can be used with existing technology, open source or vended solutions.

OSIDs are a local language service definition and bindings of them are provided in Java, PHP, and soon Objective C and C#.

Joshua Archer began by addressing the problem of having a proliferation of media resources but very few tools to connect them. OKI is presenting a single solution to this problem through OSID's (Open Service Interface Definitions).

While the technology aspects of this session sounded like they would be cool, the most exciting portion was the demonstration of what they were talking about.

Jeff Merriman from MIT demonstrated the MIT Visualizing Cultures Image Database that is using this technology, and the one I believe that initiated the whole OKI project. The point to be made here is that this web interface is pulling content from several different repositories, but by only working through with the OKI interface. He mentioned how the War Postcards collection is located in Boston, but he didn't have a clue where the "Ground Zero" collection was located. This project served the purpose of the faculty, because it allowed access to these images in one location, as well as allowing the contribution of keywords and metadata back to the images. What the faculty wanted next was the ability for students to create stories or narratives about the images in the database. This was where Pachyderm comes in.

Joshua Archer talked about the technical simplicity of the implementation of the OKI, that it is just a series of function calls. He demonstrated a Pachyderm project that was using the OKI to pull images from the same repositories. He did the same searches that Jeff performed and was able to get the same responses. The difference here is that by using Pachyderm, you get access to the benefits it provides, such as the built-in image zooming properties and the templates provided for presenting the information.

Peter Wilkins demonstrated his VUE project, a visual mapping interface, that also used OKI and same image repositories. Again, we got to see a third interface using the same images and doing the same searches with the same results.

Someone asked about Metadata, and if OKI was in any way trying to manage how this was being implemented. Jeff stated that there are other organizations out there to do that ( i.e. IMS).

The next question was about Digital Rights Management (DRM), and how OKI handles it. Jeff responded that OKI only passes assets, and that no DRM is built in. But this structure allows for DRM context to be passed with the content, such as a URL, encryption code, or even a player. For example, ArtStor is using OKI, though you still need to pay for ArtStor services to access their content.

The next question was asking how this interfaces with LMS systems, such as Blackboard. It was reported that at the Sakai conference, that Blackboard is signing up to work with OKI. This sounded like a really recent development, however this article was found from 2002.

This session ended with the discussion of how quickly OKI is being adopted right now. Existing implementations include:

- Fedora
- DSpace
- Pachyderm
- Sakai
- Harvest Road
- etc... (more listings to come at the Education Commons)